All posts by Boom California

All Posts
ArticlesExcerpts

A People’s History of SFO

on April 30, 2024

Excerpt from Chapter: Shoreline Futures

By: Eric Porter

SFO, like other airports situated along or near oceans, seas, and estuaries across the globe, is under direct threat from future sea-level rise stemming from racial capitalism’s long development as it has interfaced with atmospheric and geological processes. The question is not whether the airport will be significantly affected by sea-level rise in the future but rather when and by how much.

Knowledge of this threat is nothing new. The sea level has been rising in the Bay Area—about eight inches over the past one hundred years— and common sense has long told observers that runways situated just several feet above bodies of water would be flooded, at least intermittently, if sea levels were to rise significantly. The 1980s witnessed a flurry of government and academic studies prognosticating the effects of sea-level rise on San Francisco Bay and its surrounding communities and infrastructures (including SFO).1 During this decade SFO took some preliminary steps to address the problem by updating and adding earthen berms and seawalls around the facility’s perimeter. In 2015, the Airport Commission secured approval from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a $58 million Shoreline Protection Program to improve about one-half of the facility’s existing bay-facing seawall system. Designed to protect the airport against eleven inches of sea-level rise, the plan was based on some of the rosier estimates from recent studies detailing the potential impacts of rising bay waters on the region by 2050.2

Yet the State of California’s 2017 report, Rising Seas in California, and a 2018 follow-up report, Sea Level Rise Guidance, compelled SFO officials to take into account researchers’ more dismal sea-level rise pre- dictions while also addressing the possibility of additional flooding from one-hundred-year storm surges. According to some of the recent research, including that addressing melting ice sheets, the effects would likely be minimal before 2050 but would increase rapidly after that. Therefore, sea-rise planning should look at 2100 estimates of sea-level rise as well as 2050 estimates. Although one study projected that sea levels could rise about ten feet above 2000 levels by 2100, the report recommended planning based on the more likely scenario that they would increase between 2.4 and 3.4 feet by that date.3

The release of Sea Level Rise Guidance coincided with publication of a study indicating that various parts of the Bay Area, including SFO, were at even great risk from sea-level rise given that they were sinking by as much as ten millimeters a year as a result of the compaction of the landfill and underlying mud deposits upon which they were built. If these predictions were accurate, its authors argued, over half of the airport’s runway and taxiway area might well be underwater by 2100.4 This and other studies published at the end of the 2010s projected that SFO was on its way to becoming part of a mosaic of inundation across the Bay Area that could include Oakland International Airport and the Moffett Airfield, shoreline freeways and other major roadways, parts of San Francisco’s financial district, South Bay technology corporation campuses, tony bayside residential enclaves in Marin County, generally more middle-class communities like Alameda and Foster City, and already-vulnerable low-income, primarily Black and Brown neighbor- hoods in East Oakland, East Palo Alto, and Marin City.5

SFO’s updated Shoreline Protection Plan is best understood within this broader and worsening context of vulnerability. The current plan, as of this writing, is to build steel and concrete walls rising in some areas fifteen to twenty feet above sea level along the eight miles of the airport’s shoreline; add concrete walls to the airport sides of the San Bruno and Millbrae Canals, at the northern and southern ends of the airport respectively; and create an as-yet-to-be-determined barrier to protect the air- port from water spilling over from what could be flooded land to the west. SFO pitched the plan to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors by emphasizing the tremendous economic benefit the facility was providing to the city and the Bay Area more generally in the form of jobs, fees, tax revenues, contracts, purchases, and so on that stemmed directly and indirectly from airport operations. All told, “SFO’s total economic footprint within the Bay Area,” SFO claimed, amounted “to approximately $62.5 billion in business sales, including $20.9 billion in total payroll, and more than 300,000 jobs in the region.” The supervisors approved the $590 million project (with an ultimate cost after interest of as much as $1.7 billion) in September 2019. It was to be paid for with airport revenue bonds that would, in turn, be reimbursed with funds generated by airport leases and concession revenues. Pending environmental review and permitting, the project is scheduled to begin in 2025.6

Other local entities have been moving forward with their own plans for protecting themselves against sea-level rise. The Port of Oakland has embarked on a $46 million project to raise the dike protecting Oakland Airport’s runways and terminals by two feet, although this project would address only estimated sea-level rise through 2050.7 In November 2018, San Francisco voters approved a $425 million project to rebuild the seawall running along the city’s Embarcadero.8 San Mateo County cities along the bay near the airport have been developing their own plans for building or strengthening seawalls.9 In ongoing attempts to raise capital to pay for such mitigation, Oakland, San Francisco, San Mateo County, and Marin County were among the municipal, county, and state governments across the United States that in 2017 filed law- suits against oil, natural gas, and coal companies that sought, unsuccessfully so far, to hold them liable for costs associated with sea-level rise. 9

There have been efforts to coordinate Bay Area sea-level rise mitigation plans so that there is some measure of fairness and equity in this process when it comes to vulnerable populations and municipalities and so that an unsystematic approach to building them does not make sea- level rise worse in some places by diverting water in their direction. The San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas (2019), for example, encouraged planners to think beyond infrastructural and municipal boundaries and collaborate with others when addressing sea-level rise given that the bay is an “interconnected physical system” that does not adhere to such boundaries. It suggested that Bay Area planners think instead about how their communities (or parts of them) were components of one or more of the thirty “operational landscape units” (OLUs) surrounding the bay that were defined by common physical attributes. The report encouraged local entities to work with other constituencies that shared their OLUs and, when possible, “to identify where nature- based approaches, such as beaches, marshes, and subtidal reefs, can help create a resilient shoreline with multiple benefits.”10

By the time SFO submitted its Shoreline Protection Plan proposal to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for approval, it had been exploring the possibility of coordinating its efforts not only with those of San Mateo County and the California Department of Transportation but also with the surrounding communities of South San Francisco, San Bruno, Millbrae, and Burlingame. This made sense given that SFO and the four cities were all part of the same OLU as identified by the Atlas. But SFO pointed out that these other entities were only just beginning to identify their vulnerabilities and that it was very unlikely that they would have their protection systems in place within the next ten years.11 The uncertain plans for a seawall on the western side of the airport, then, reflected the contingency that SFO might have to go it alone to protect its own interests, leaving its neighbors to fend for themselves, should collaborative projects not be feasible.

The Shoreline Protection Plan was in these ways another articulation of the bottom-line sensibility governing SFO’s vision of “holistic sustainability.” It represented the facility as both site and facilitator of overlapping webs of social, economic, governmental, and environmental relationships that defined the region and enabled it to survive. Climate change represented an existential threat to the facility through sea-level rise, but it also offered a possibility for reimagining airport operations and their role in activating the relationships that sustained the Bay Area. In SFO’s and its supporters’ publicly expressed views, these relationships would ideally be fair and equitable and encourage thriving for the human and nonhuman entities dependent on or protected by a still-functioning airport but only so far as the airport’s own operational survival could be preserved.

It is in part on these terms that SFO moves into the future as an infra- structural manifestation of a succession of regional colonial presents, layered on top of sinking concrete, steel, and landfill upon mud. The airport continues to draw Bay Area inhabitants, human and nonhuman, into contingent, exclusionary, and incorporative relationships, some of which are becoming more visibly bound up in the survival of the planet itself. As before, the reproduction of power through these relationships stems from the operations of the things themselves in complex, multidirectional ways as well as through attempts to mitigate them. So, what might that look like, as SFO, like other airports, tries to sustain itself— and, by extension, as multiple constituents try to sustain themselves— into an uncertain future? And how will such work help to define the Bay Area’s future regional colonial presents?

Whatever happens will remain part of a global story of how, in Julie Sze’s words, “capitalism and carbon live out and through systematic dispossession, production, extraction, and disposability—in short, death and violence.” The neocolonial- and neoliberal-wrought environmental devastation and the killing fields in the Niger Delta and the Amazon headwaters are among the latest manifestations of this history, and over one billion people possibly displaced across the globe by various effects of climate change (water shortages, extreme heat, stronger storms, wildfires, armed conflicts, and, of course, rising seas) by 2050 represents its short-term future.12 But a significant part of this global story of the exercise of asymmetrical power will be the efforts to mitigate and repair the damage wrought by this devastating history linked to the pursuit of wealth and convenience.

The recent past, globally, has been defined not only by new forms of political and economic sovereignty across the globe (albeit often limited and contradictory) but also by the ability of growing numbers of humans to consume more fossil fuels after having that expression of modernity “suppressed” by Western powers.13 Yet the economic growth of developing countries—much deserved, by a certain calculation, after being stymied by European and US interests—and the attendant rise of their carbon emissions have helped bring home the fact that a just distribution of resources and consumption of them rooted in our fossil fuel–based economy is an unfolding disaster that may culminate in the end of humans on earth.14

SFO, as international hub for passengers and cargo, has helped to facilitate this dynamic at a global as well as a local scale. On the one hand, international airports reproduce unequal economic relationships that go hand in hand with continued asymmetries in carbon emission levels. One recent study shows that 1 percent of flyers account for 50 percent of all aircraft emissions, while only 11 percent of the world’s population fly at all in the given year.14 Scaling that up, we know that global megacities, enriched by technology and finance, are leaving cities in “flyover country” behind.15 And we cannot forget that the proliferation of global systems of finance and goods, facilitated by air travel and commerce, is also the path to short-term immiseration for those still left out of this redistribution of resources. Consider what global capital accumulation has done for female Bangladeshi garment factory workers; young men mining coltan for mobile phones in the Democratic Republic of Congo; migrants of all ages and genders risking being caged, being raped, or dying in the desert along the United States’ southern border; the unhoused living in tents, collecting cans, and trading bicycle parts in an increasingly unaffordable Bay Area (and where I live in Santa Cruz), and . . . that list goes on.

Yet airborne commerce simultaneously represents the possible amelioration of some exclusions and inequalities. Industry champions often point out that such commerce fuels economic growth in countries with developing economies such as China, India, and Kenya, enriching the elite, of course, but also sustaining electronics manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries that are lifting at least some workers and their families out of poverty.15 Ditto for the rapidly growing travel and tourism sector—approximately 10 percent of the global economy before the Covid-19 pandemic—which, while leading to profoundly uneven economic development in tourist areas and a decline of status for farmers, factory workers, and others engaged in longer-standing means of supporting themselves, also leads to significant social advancement for others.16

Some have argued that the relatively limited current impact of aviation on global warming for the time being (perhaps 3.5 percent now) relative to its economic benefits suggests that air travel for business and leisure and cargo operations should be encouraged while the world focuses on reducing the greater threat of emissions from burning coal. Yet such a strategy, which could see aviation’s share of global emissions rise to 15–20 percent, might at best only keep the world on the perilous path being defined by current levels of emissions given how entangled air travel and cargo are with other economic sectors (manufacturing, ground transportation, agriculture) that otherwise rely on fossil fuel use.17 Consider, for example, SFO’s claims about its indirect impact on the Bay Area economy. And, of course, if the world becomes more economically just, as the wages of workers across the world increase, even if minimally, in a global economy stimulated by air commerce, those workers will use more fossil fuel directly to heat their homes, cook their food, and get to work, and, indirectly, to grow their food and manufacture the material goods they purchase.18

Wealthier nations and urban areas across the global North will generally be in a better position to mitigate the effects of climate change than their poorer counterparts in the South, but there will be differential responses among rich and poor constituents in both North and South.19 There will no doubt be some measure of displacement from sea-level rise around the Bay Area, perhaps by 2050, certainly by 2100, and everyone will feel some effects. Most likely, poor and working-class people, especially those who are Black, indigenous, and people of color, will be affected more dramatically by sea-level rise in the region. There is, after all, greater probability that wealthier low-lying neighborhoods or what are deemed essential or commercial or transportation infrastructures will be better protected by government-funded mitigation projects than will lower-income flatland neighborhoods.20 If communities are intermittently or permanently inundated, wealthier individuals and small businesses in those areas, generally speaking, as was evident in Houston, New Orleans, and elsewhere in recent decades, will be better equipped, given their social and financial capital, to address their circumstances by rebuilding, relocating, negotiating legal and federal aid systems, and so on.

Yet a future of neoliberal depredation and asymmetrical social power may be complicated by the contingently obligatory relations of people, power, and things defining the region. There may be differential out- comes for lower- or middle-income people in low-lying areas, depending on the extent to which their neighborhoods, by virtue of proximity, fall within the areas covered by projects geared toward protecting wealthier neighborhoods or critical infrastructures. Residents living in modest neighborhoods near US 101 in Marin or San Mateo Counties or Interstate 880 in East Oakland could be protected by projects designed to keep open these major transportation corridors. A multiracial coalition of community activists, environmentalists, and municipal officials in East Palo Alto are already engaged in an impressive array of efforts to make their community more climate resistant, but they could additionally benefit if plans for collaborative shoreline protection ventures with wealthier, neighboring communities and regional planning agencies materialize.21

Also potentially playing a role moving forward is gentrification. Formerly a majority-African American city, now majority-Latinx, East Palo Alto is again undergoing transformation as wealthier, young technology sector workers are moving in. As of this writing, the median home price was just under $1 million. Although it is unclear what this and similar communities will look like decades from now, growing populations of wealthier residents may be able to leverage more clout, tax base, and networks to mitigate the effects of rising bay waters, thus increasing the likelihood that lower-income residents will be protected too—at least those who are not displaced by rising housing costs.

SFO, as assemblage, will continue to play its own role in the local human drama of sea-level rise, displacement, and mitigation. The relatively modest—albeit with extraordinarily high home prices—neighbor- hoods of Bayside Manor in Millbrae and Lomita Park in San Bruno might benefit from a successful collaboration between SFO and its neighbors. But if SFO ends up acting on its own to build a seawall on the landward side of its perimeter before those cities complete projects of their own, their low-lying neighborhoods may experience even greater flooding. And even a successful collaboration between SFO and its immediate neighbors may well increase flooding in areas elsewhere near the bay that remain unprotected.22

Meanwhile, sustained employment at SFO may indeed enable some residents of these and other low- and middle-income neighborhoods to better endure the effects of climate change. As discussed earlier, airport work for Black and Filipinx workers has been a site of advancement but also of marginality, as it has been for others. SFO is a site where racial and gendered asymmetries emanating from long histories of colonial encounter and labor exploitation continue to play out. Even with new- found commitments to “social equity,” hierarchies of status, pay, and relative permanence are likely to be exacerbated by job cuts and reductions of hours stemming from climate-related rising operational costs and disruptions. Yet for some, SFO will remain a source of steady work, enabling them and their families to maintain some measure of stability amid challenging circumstances.

But workers in a future “carbon-neutral” airport that facilities the release of huge amounts of Scope 3 emissions will, of course, be implicated in further climate change. Not as much as the oil companies who made great profits and exacted exorbitant human and environmental costs extracting fossil fuels over the years and then did what they could since the 1960s, and especially since the late 1970s, to diminish public knowledge of the long-term climatic impacts of the burning of these fuels and to stymie government regulation of that burning.23 And not as much as the local governments now suing the oil economies that have up until very recently promoted carbon-centered development. And not as much as the airlines, and not as much as frequent-flying cosmopolitan business and leisure travelers. But to the extent that airport workers sustain the operation, commute to and from work, and use their wages to travel by air, they will, collectively, like other less wealthy people across the globe, play a growing role in the deterioration of the planet as populations grow and individuals use more carbon resources.

SFO as heavy infrastructure on sinking Ramaytush Ohlone land, dumping carbon into the atmosphere even as the facility becomes greener, will in these and other ways reproduce the Bay Area’s multiple colonial pasts and presents, articulated or disarticulated as they will be, to and from the colonial pasts and presents of other places. SFO’s “sustainability,” then, is ultimately a descriptor of a current set of environ- mentally and socially focused policies and of present and future manifestations of a history of reproducing power in the Bay Area. SFO does not represent the whole story of our networked, regional colonial present and its possible futures, yet as a uniquely visible, spectacular and mundane, deeply symbolic assemblage, it offers insights about the social, political, cultural, and economic dynamics that have shaped the layers of colonial encounter that have defined the region over the past century and will do so into as much as we have of a future.

How humans will ultimately respond to the climate crisis remains an open question. Despite the recent and more obvious local signs of the crisis—fires and smoke, drought and excessive heat, floods and mudslides when rainstorms do actually happen—there are signs all around the region that the forces of business as usual hold firm, that many people are too entrenched in their routines and their investments in comfort, convenience, God, or ideology to move beyond denial. Some, well aware of what’s coming, are moving forward with a cynical understanding, shared by elites and members of the middle classes across the globe, that poor people, Indigenous people, and people of color—by virtue of previous acts of marginalization and dispossession that put them in harm’s way in urban heat islands, low-lying areas, and marginal reservation lands with limited resources to take action on their own behalf—will just have to bear the brunt of the effects of global warming.24 Such awareness is often paired with the belief that new security measures will be necessary to keep their responses to those effects (both political and migratory) in check.25 Some are paralyzed by the unfathomableness of it all, while governments are paralyzed by partisan, bureaucratic, or budgetary dysfunction. Some are putting their faith in technological or market-based fixes. Some of the most marginalized and aggrieved are simply trying to survive other crises.

But California and the Bay Area in particular remain key nodes of activism around climate change, and many of their residents, individually and collectively, are working toward a reparative future by engaging in important small acts in the arenas of environmental justice, ecological restoration, scientific and social research, education, urban gardening and food redistribution, and old-fashioned protest.26 Local Indigenous peoples have been important leaders in such efforts. Members of the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, for example, have been working with state agencies and conservation groups on ecological restoration projects on the Peninsula that “seek to show how Indigenous practices of land management are critical in addressing climate collapse.” These include the restoration of trout and salmon habitats in San Mateo County creeks.27 The Indigenous women-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in the East Bay has dedicated itself “to heal and transform the legacies of colonization, genocide, and patriarchy and to do the work our ancestors and future generations are calling us to do.” At the time of this writing they were in the process of establishing a series of Himmetkas, or “culturally based emergency response hub[s],” designed to ameliorate the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and other crises through the creation of ceremonial space, food and medicine gardens, stores of medicine and clean water, and other community resources.28

Such work is necessary: small acts, as they are, they stem from broader projects of sovereignty and cultural revitalization that remain, as they always have been, the most foundationally important responses to the networked colonialisms and imperialisms set in motion in the region by Spanish soldiers and missionaries, Californio ranchers, and Anglo financiers, and lived by most of the rest of us through a multiplicity of historically unfolding assemblages. These decolonial responses point to a possible future, very different from the one most of us who live in and around the Bay Area have the capacity to pursue. Perhaps there is hope for a successful movement—and real reform, with land repatriation and wealth redistribution accompanying environmental repair—to follow this lead despite the proliferation of signs that the enormity of the problems generated by climate change and the sum total of human refusals to deal with it will just be too extensive to over- come, by anyone. Some of that struggle may well manifest itself at and around SFO as long as it remains open, and SFO, in turn, may well continue to be a touchstone for analyzing the relationships that have defined the region—at least as long as people still have the luxury of analyzing things.

It is fitting that San Francisco Bay will be a primary agent in what comes next. After long being filled, silted, polluted, littered, sonically assaulted, and warmed over, the bay (and whatever living things are left in it), with its expanding waters most recently the product of the longer durée of racial capitalism, will continue its epochal processes of rising and falling, moved by the earth’s and moon’s gravitational pulls and changing winds. As it transforms the contours of surrounding tidelands and makes new tidelands, it will approach, surround, and perhaps even move within the airport. The bay will thus, by extension, help redefine the colonial presents of the future, with its intrusive, brackish water demanding of those people who inhabit it a more holistic, planetary perspective than many of us hold today when it comes to understanding connections among humans, other forms of life, and their built and nature-made surroundings.29

Eric Porter is Professor of History, History of Consciousness, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

SOURCES

  1. Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 81.
  2. Institute for Economics and Peace, Ecological Threat Register 2020, 4.
  3. Ghosh, Great Derangement, 107–10; Mitchell, Carbon Democracy.
  4. As Amitav Ghosh argues, “Inasmuch as the fruits of the carbon economy constitute wealth, and inasmuch as the poor of the global south have historically been deprived of this wealth, it is certainly true, by every available canon of distributive justice, that they are entitled to a greater share of the rewards of that economy. But even to enter into that argument is to recognize how deeply we are mired in the Great Derangement: our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but toward our self-annihilation.” Great Derangement, 110–11.
  5. “One Percent of the World’s Population Accounts for More Than Half of Flying Emissions,” Lund University, News, November 19, 2020, www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/one-percent-worlds-population-accounts-more-half- flying-emissions.
  6. Emily Badger, “The Megacity, Untethered,” New York Times, December 24, 2017.
  7. Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, 337–38.
  8. For an account of the contradictory effects of tourism on a region (specifically, Mexico’s Yúcatan Peninsula), see Córdoba Azcárate, Stuck with Tourism.
  9. Kasarda and Lindsay, Aerotropolis, 335–44; Griggs and Howarth, Politics of Airport Expansion, 67, 308–9; Ritchie, “Climate Change and Flying.”
  10. Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital,” 11.
  11. Sengupta, “Crisis Right Now,” New York Times.
  12. Lise Alves, “San Francisco Bay Area’s Multifront Plans,” Miami Beach Times.
  13. Kevin Stark and Ezra David Romero, “What Can the Bay Area Do about Rising Seas? East Palo Alto Has a Few Great Answers,” KQED, April 22, 2021, http://www.kqed.org/science/1973805/climate-solutions-in-east-palo-alto; Gennady Sheyner, “With Baylands under Flood Threat, Palo Alto Explores Projects to Address Sea Level Rise,” Palo Alto Online, September 8, 2020, http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/09/07/with-baylands-under-flood-threat-palo-alto-explores-projects-to-address-sea-level-rise.
  14. The potential of local sea-rise mitigation projects to increase flooding elsewhere in the Bay Area is discussed in Hummel et al., “Economic Evaluation.”
  15. Rich, Losing Earth.
  16. Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, “How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering,” New York Times, August 24, 2020; Christopher Flavelle and Kalen Goodluck, “Dispossessed, Again,” New York Times, October 28, 2021.
  17. Ghosh, Great Derangement, 143–49.
  18. For a survey of such activity across California, see Merenlender and Buhler, Climate Stewardship.
  19. Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, “Purpose Statement,” accessed June 24, 2021, http://www.ramaytush.org/about.html.
  20. Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, “Our Vision,” accessed July 20, 2021, https://sogoreate-landtrust.org.
  21. Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital,” 23. As Chakrabarty puts it, “The realization that humans—all humans, rich or poor—come late in the planet’s life and dwell more in the position of passing guests than possessive hosts has to be an integral part of the perspective from which we pursue our all-too-human but legitimate quest for justice on issues to do with the iniquitous impact of anthropogenic climate change.”
Interviews

It’s the Stories We Tell Ourselves

on April 1, 2024

On the Front Porch with Oakland Activist David Peters

An Interview by Dr. Gregory Downs

On the front porch of his house in West Oakland’s Hoover-Foster neighborhood, across the street from one of the elementary schools that define the neighborhood, David Peters knows everybody, whether he’s met them or not. Animated, boisterous, and always busy, he surprises strangers by calling out to them, and fails to surprise his neighbors—including cousins next door—who are used to his booming voice. 

Peters’ voice extends far beyond his front porch. As the founder of two community organizations, he is helping sustain cultural assets in West Oakland, even as the neighborhood is under the dual threats of gentrification and neglect. Cut off from much of Oakland by elevated expressways, the Hoover-Foster neighborhood has suffered from decades of disinvestment and trauma. Peters’ West Oakland Community Action Network mobilizes local people to fight for their fair share.

But it is also a neighborhood defined by cultural assets, some visible in the beautiful murals of Black Oakland history, others visible only when Peters narrates them on the Black Liberation Walking Tour he regularly leads. On those tours, Peters guides groups to more than a dozen sites that together convey the importance of this neighborhood. Some are the homes of locally famous people, others of activists who fought predatory lenders, others churches and community groups, one the site of the Black Panthers’ first-ever community breakfast and some of their most significant historical moments. Knowledge of these moments can, Peters believes, instill in people a sense of pride in where they are, a pride that he counts as a literal asset, making the tour a form of reinvestment in a neighborhood suffering from decades of disinvestment. The tour has been named one of six standout Black history tours by Condé Nast and has been featured in local press and podcasts.

Photos courtesy of David Peters

I met Peters on one of his tours and was immediately struck by the way he made this history not only visible but meaningful to both old and young. As a longtime History professor, I know how challenging this is, and how many people feel disconnected from the places they live. Since then, I’ve accompanied tours as a volunteer to watch and learn from Peters’ community-centered model, and this Spring I asked him to explain his neighborhood-centered approach to preserving Black life and Black memory, in a place where both are in jeopardy and his optimism that pride of place can be a restorative, even revolutionary act.

Greg Downs: Okay, we’re doing all right, it is Thursday and I’m here on the porch of David Peters, founder of many things, including the Black Liberation Walking Tour. So, just to start us off in a way that helps people understand where we are, and to understand the work you’re doing here, can you tell me about this neighborhood? What was it like as a kid here?

Dave Peters: This neighborhood has various names depending on who you are when it was, and where you’re from. We’re in a part of West Oakland that is not what people traditionally think of when they think of West Oakland. Generally, they think of what we call the Lower Bottoms or over on Seventh Street. 

We’re here in what’s variously known as the Hoover-Foster neighborhood or the Hoover-Durant neighborhood. Both of those names are for the two schools that served this neighborhood for nearly 100 years, one of which is no longer here. And then it also has a legacy named Ghost Town, and there are various stories about how that name came about. That is a local name that folks in this neighborhood gave it and that some still hold fiercely to. There’s a point of pride in being from a time when it was really a tough neighborhood to be in, a tough neighborhood to survive, like so many of our inner-city neighborhoods during the crack bomb era. It could be dangerous, so folks took that name [Ghost Town] as a point of pride. I don’t like it. It symbolizes what I think of as the worst times in this neighborhood. So we’ll leave that there. 

This neighborhood is so important to me. We’re sitting here on my front porch. My cousins are next door over there, and they actually used to live here. They grew up in here, in this house, when my uncle who lives next door was here with his family, and I was born next door in that house, my grandparents’ house, and they moved into that house in 1950. They migrated from the South [Louisiana and Texas] to come out and work, and I think it was 1942. Certainly I look at this neighborhood through the lens of a certain nostalgia because who doesn’t have a certain nostalgia for the places and the circumstances that we grew up in? And I think for me, particularly, because it was these two side-by-side properties, we found these were just really a cocoon of warmth and love. These properties are a lifeline for me to be able to move back here, five years ago with my wife, come back to where I was from.

Now certainly, as a young child and preteen you are not really as aware of perceptions of the neighborhood and poverty and crime and inequity. So, maybe I wasn’t as exposed to some of the things that were happening in the neighborhood that the adults were, but it just was a very warm place for me that had so much family connections in my blood family, but also in cultural family connections. So many of the folks on this block were my grandparents’ cohorts, kind of in their age range. They shared this cultural bond. So many of them were migrants from the rural south. In Oakland, the migrants, the Black migrants, were primarily from Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas. And so they had, you know, sort of this common culture. Very frequently, you had folks who came from the same towns form associations and clubs. Here in Oakland, that was a common thing. Sometimes people think, all southern cultures are similar and they are very similar, but in certain respects, they’re much different. And I think Louisiana is particularly different. And I think those particular Louisianans, those Black Catholics, brought a particular culture here as well. So for me growing up here in this neighborhood, it was special because of those personal memories. 

It was also very influential historically and culturally in the early 70s, late 60s, early 70s. Here was a time of just incredible political ferment. I think everybody is sort of familiar with many of those movements on the New Left, everything from free speech to anti draft, Black Power, Black nationalism, gay rights, women’s rights, third world liberation. All of those things were part of the ferment in the air that influenced me and my youngest memories growing up as a kind of precocious kid who read everything they could get his hands on. I was really exposed to a lot of these ideas, both in my reading as well as just being around the adults who would have conversations about the topics of the day.

Downs: There’s a lot of pride in the neighborhood, and walking around with you, you can see people who really feel that pride. Tell me where you think that pride comes from.

Peters: I think firstly, it just comes from Oakland. We’re across the bay from the city. That columnist [Herb Caen] called it Baghdad by the bay and said no real San Franciscan ever crosses the Bay Bridge willingly. Oakland has always been San Francisco’s redheaded stepchild kind of city. And Oakland has working-class roots. I don’t know how much it’s a working-class city anymore. Then in the seventies we had all the sports teams so San Francisco was our rivals. That was a great source of pride, that the bigger, richer, more picturesque tourist capital financial center, glossy city across the bay, we would be whipping them. And then a lot of that’s played out in our local press. The San Francisco Chronicle has been one a much more influential paper than the Oakland Tribune. And there’s certainly a sense here in Oakland that we’re not covered equitably. The crime stories would say, oh, crime in Oakland. But crime stories in San Francisco wouldn’t say crime in San Francisco. They’d say crime in the Bayview or crime in Chinatown. Oakland got painted with a broad brush. 

I think that gives people from Oakland a sense of having a chip on their shoulder. And I think we tend to root for underdogs. We’ve certainly always been subversive and had subversive political thoughts, anti-authoritarianism. And I think that’s kind of the root of that pride for Oaklanders, the sense of pride that comes from living in coming up in a neighborhood where you’re getting the shorter end of the stick from government, from lending institutions, from retailers that don’t want to put their stores in. So all of this just kind of lends this sense of being an underdog. Then this neighborhood was particularly violent at one point. I think you find anybody that comes out of any underdog circumstance is going to have a lot of pride about where they’re from.

Downs: Let’s shift to the tour. Let’s give people a sense of the flavor of the tour. What are some of your favorite aspects of leading the tour? 

Peters: For me, this tour is very therapeutic. Right? It gives me an opportunity to talk about some of the major inequities that I have experienced, that I have learned about. That ability to share this story with others, many of whom know some parts of it or have something to add that I don’t know, but to be able to tell it in my own way. So for me, it’s just personal, right? I’ve inserted myself into this tour, and it’s really a love story of my neighborhood. 

One of my favorite stops is just a couple houses up the street here at the former residence of C. L. Dellums, the longtime vice president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters Union, one of the heads of the California Fair Employment Commission from its inception. He really fought to get that established. And then he did other work to break down discrimination in hiring in other places around the Bay Area, particularly retail stores in San Francisco and Oakland. I think he is an under-known figure in the West Coast civil rights movement and I posit that he is the central and founding figure in that movement. Yet, he’s not memorialized here in the city. He made his home here [on this block] after coming here from Texas, like so many others, and he came very early in 1920s. Sometimes we tell the story of the Black presence in Oakland starting in the 1940s and certainly there’s a huge growth then, but there’s always been a long presence of black folks here in Oakland. So that’s one of the stops I really like.

Photo courtesy of David Peters

Downs: And how about we talk about where you start on the tour?

Peters: Yeah, one of my favorite sites and certainly one of the more important Black Power sites in the world is the former site of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church. It was founded as an Episcopal Church specifically for Black folks, back in 1910. And that church and its leaders had always been involved in the NAACP and other civil rights efforts here in Oakland. When Father Earl Neil came, he provided a meeting place and refuge for the Black Panther Party in the late 60s. And on the tour there’s an audio recording from him about physically barring the doors to the Oakland Police Department who tried to come in one day on a false pretext. 

At a time when the church community, respectable Black folks, and the so-called wild-eyed radicals of the Panthers were supposedly at odds with each other, Father Neil stood up for justice. He did not allow the police to come in that day, and who knows what may have happened if they would have come in and perhaps rounded up the Panther leadership that was in attendance? That site had the funeral of George and Jonathan Jackson, so tragically murdered, martyrs of the Black nationalist movement. Certainly George Jackson’s work in the prison reform movement made that history so present and palpable here in this neighborhood.

Then the first Panther breakfast program was founded there as a joint program of St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church and the Black Panther Party. Just to be clear about that credit there, it was said that Ruth Beckford, the famous American dancer, perhaps it was her idea, and she and Father Neil did the legwork, the administrative work to get everything cleared up with the city and the county, but it was the first time the Panthers served a community breakfast. This is just an amazingly important historical place.

Downs: And then let me touch on a couple of my favorites if that’s okay. These are two activists separated by a century: Delilah Beasley and Annette Miller. What is it like to go by a house that held one of the great, unknown Black female journalists and historians of the early 20th century [in Beasley] and then to go by the house of a contemporary family that successfully fought against foreclosure by Deutsche Bank, a woman who helps inspire and educate housing activists today?

Peters:  These two Black women, separated by a century, illustrate the importance of Black women leadership, of strong, rebellious, Black women leadership in this neighborhood and as it is across America. Today in this neighborhood, in so many of our local organizations, Black women continue to play leading roles. Delilah Beasley wrote Negro Trailblazers of California and self-published that over a century ago at a time of very violent racism in California and in Oakland; that is an amazing story. As she writes in her forward, she almost died in this task. I’m gonna say it was because she worked her fingers to the bone, but certainly it took a harrowing effort to cultivate patrons, generally white woman patrons, that funded her effort to travel all around the state of California to collect these stories in the 1910s. The stories of those 1800s Black pioneers, as well as the Africans that came with the Spanish earlier, were being lost. 

She realized the importance of writing down this history, of preserving this knowledge for future generations. It is important for people to be able to see themselves reflected in literature and history, and it is particularly important for Black people. Black people, like other oppressed groups, have to see ourselves in the history, in the literature, in the culture, to reaffirm ourselves. She’s very clear about that. In addition she wrote for the Oakland Tribune, as the first Black syndicated columnist in the United States, not the first Black woman syndicated columnist, the first Black syndicated columnist in United States, and then she worked in other many other local civic groups around social justice. 

Photo courtesy of David Peters

Then we leap ahead 100 years and here is Annette Miller, who, like me is a multi-generational resident of the neighborhood who was able to take on Deutsche Bank and fight them off from foreclosing on her family’s house at a time when this neighborhood was transformed by the predatory lending crisis and so many friends and neighbors and families had their houses seized. Her inspiring ability to just say no in the face of this huge, faceless international bank is really powerful. Many of the students that we take on the tour, really connect with that because it’s a story not of someone 100 years ago, or someone rich or famous or powerful, but someone that is just like so many of us, someone who said no, organized with other people who were also saying no and fighting and demanding housing justice. She continues to be a leader in this neighborhood in so many other ways.

Downs: Just before we move off this, looking over on your wristbands, one of them says I Love being Black. Are you comfortable talking a little bit about that aspect of the pride, that so many of these amazing figures, they’re not just neighborhood figures, but they are Black Oakland people?

Peters: I think that’s one of the things I treasured most about growing up in the time and the place that I grew up in. There was this flowering of the Black Power and Black Pride movement. I think in the 50s, if you were called black, you could have been in a fight, because that was an insult…..Perhaps this was one of the first instances of a group taking a slur and embracing it and turning into a term of pride. And so, one of my earliest memories is hearing James Brown on the radio singing “Say it loud, I’m black, and I’m proud.” I have a vivid memory of that in my grandfather’s truck, and that must have been 1969, 50 plus years ago. 

Downs: Did your grandfather like James Brown?

Peters: My grandfather was a blues guy, he was from Texas. His taste ran more to blues. But certainly he was a very prideful black man. And you could see it in his bearing in his care. Like so many grandparents out there, he could do everything, right? Not a man that went all the way through high school. He trained as a welder, came out and worked as a machinist but could do everything. Work on cars and work on houses. Could grow everything in the backyard, and we went fishing, just all of these just things that I thought were amazing and you know, not a man of very many words.

In that era, then the Panthers were active in the streets and you’d see people like our paperboy, one day he had on the uniform. He had on a braid leather jacket. He’s a Panther and I was very prideful, and people were talking about Black is beautiful, and Black Power, about afros and dashikis. 

During that whole time period, I was just really in this really affirming Black cultural environment, where Black was positive and everybody was talking about this topic in a positive way. It’s not that way anymore. Now, some of the most naked racism and prejudice and Jim Crow-ism doesn’t exist because we don’t live in such segregated neighborhoods anymore. But then, in my remembrance, it’s really an all-Black environment and neighborhood. When I grew up, we had people of different classes, income levels, educational levels, kind of all together. I don’t want to oversell that. But I think there was this cultural cocoon that I grew up in. 

Any oppressed group anywhere in the world is gonna have that pride. Particularly just being from Oakland, and being Black from Oakland, you have this double pressure. So I wear this bracelet saying, I Love Being Black, because you know, there’s a cost to it, right? On many levels, financial and psychological, emotional. We don’t understand all the health impacts. That pride of that culture of survival, knowing the sacrifices that people make, and sometimes we hear folks go, oh, you know, we shouldn’t talk about slavery because it makes you feel like a victim or it makes you depressed. No, it’s a source of pride and strength and power to know the things that my people survived. 

Downs: I want to talk about one more spot on the tour. There’s a spot that isn’t one of these landmarks, like the other places, but it’s a corner where you ask people to look up at the highway that cuts across the neighborhood. I don’t want to say it defines the neighborhood because the neighborhood defines the neighborhood. But it’s certainly had a big impact on the neighborhood. And you ask people to listen, and to think about the exhaust and to think about the impact of that big scar put across the neighborhood. Did you always know you would do that on the tour? Or is that something that came to you as you started leading?

Peters:  I knew that was going to be part of the tour. I’m traumatized by that. I think West Oakland, collectively, is traumatized by those freeways and the conditions, the governmental planning that led to that. It defined the current boundaries of West Oakland. This was considered to be North Oakland a generation or two ago, before those freeways were put up. 

This is something that’s played out all across America. The geographies of this neighborhood, the built environment, the psychological environment, the economic environment, are all greatly influenced, perhaps even determined, by those freeways. It’s all part of a whole. We can go back to the redlining maps, the risk map from the Home Owners Loan Corporation that said that this neighborhood was risky at a time when there were very few Black people here. The mere presence of my family as the fourth Black family on the block, that was enough for the assessors to say to the government, who was going to provide guarantees for the loans, that this was a risky neighborhood. That crime led to higher or no lending, that wealth that’s transferred. The folks here in this neighborhood always had to pay taxes, but were not able to receive that government guarantee for their real estate lending. 

So if you look now at everything from the pollution, maps, poverty maps, lack of green space, all of these markers are inequity. Follow these red lines and the racial makeup. The neighborhood is still defined by something that was mapped out in the 1930s almost 100 years ago. And then, when the federal government planned the interstate highways, those red lines were used in many ways, and I think there’s a specific government memo that told municipalities, Hey, use these freeways to build barriers between Black people or other minorities and the other parts of town. You can use the highway to tear down neighborhoods, to displace people. You can use this as an entree to the urban renewal acts in these areas where the areas that were put under urban renewal were those areas that were redlined. No investment, no access to capital, people can’t borrow against their property. So of course, you see the housing and commercial business start to decline. 

Governments then come in under urban renewal to just level areas and redistribute that land to other folks. It’s a way to recapitalize land for other, future owners. That is such an important part of the neighborhood, the story of all of West Oakland, a lot of East Oakland and some of North Oakland as well. You can’t tell the story of West Oakland, nor urban America without telling me that story. Students came out here and asked people for recommendations for reparations, and one of the things we talked about was that this is this generational trauma, and there are thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, who are still here who are suffering, who have directly or generationally suffered from this trauma and that need to be invested in, you know, repaired, so to speak. Reparations, whatever you want to think or talk about that, it is indisputable and traceable and quantifiable to talk about what happened with redlining and that transfer of wealth and opportunity from Oakland to the suburbs and this relationship that we currently have between Oakland and its suburbs in terms of the concentration of poverty in Oakland and the concentration of wealth in its suburbs.

Downs: And I just think of when you point to the exhaust poisoning people for generations, and it’s right there. It’s so stark. Switching topics, do you have any moments as you’ve given the tour, where the reaction of the audience or things that happen really stand out to you or help capture you know, what you’re what you’re aiming for?

Peters: Yeah, absolutely. I had a group of high school students a couple of weeks ago that came on the tour. After that first stop about the Panthers, they were on fire with the power to actually be in this place where something happened that they had learned about in class. 

I had a group of middle schoolers and we stopped at Ms. Miller’s house and talked about how she saved that house. These are kids living with housing insecurity and housing displacement, so they get this and they were inspired by that. That’s awesome. Right? They were able to talk about getting organized. You can make things happen. So those things were really rewarding. 

I took out a group from a crisis support and mental health and suicide prevention nonprofit here. And then I got a call back from the executive director who told me she was inspired to start a community speaker series around mental health about the way things happening in the community are an aid to better mental health. She said, I got that from the tour. I’m blown away.

Downs: I’ve seen you lead school groups. Do you have optimism about the youth these days, that we’re about to see a more activist generation?

Peters: Absolutely. I have great optimism about the youth today. I made this comment to a younger person not too long ago that you can’t imagine the range of the political spectrum and activism back in the early 70s. And they looked at me like what?

Photo courtesy of Dr. David Peters

Downs: They didn’t accept that premise? You know, 20 years ago, I would have guessed even a very woke progressive white kid might have been like, that’s right the range of political opinion was wider back then, they couldn’t imagine that context, even if they and their friends were activists. It was easy to feel 20 or 30 years ago, that they would be in a small pool. And it does feel like the pool is bigger now.

Peters: Right? There’s social media stuff. They’re able to use that to organize and communicate. It is amazing to me to see Oakland Tech [High School], their leadership in the summer of Black lives, leading protests and marches. There are so many youth groups or groups that are fostering youth leadership around Oakland now. It is amazing. I don’t want to oversell it because I grew up in an era where there was a lot of activism and political education. Then, theory may have been more widespread. But I think now, in terms of racial justice, I think there are strong parallels between now and late 60s, early 70s. 

Downs: I want to ask about the more abstract applications of this work. You talk about the importance of cultural assets. What does that mean to you? And how does that help you capture what you’re trying to convey and preserve on this tour?

Peters: Cultural assets equal belonging for me. It’s being in an environment, a neighborhood and community, that you feel not only welcome in, not only that you feel belonging in, but that you feel a sense of ownership and pride. You’re talking about navigating the spaces comfortably. Now I’ve lived in other neighborhoods in Oakland, where you know, I’ve had to deal with things, like the neighbors called the police on me for robbing my own house.

Downs: It’s horrible. The idea of someone calling the cops on you, it’s beyond comical.

Peters: It was horrible. I live with the rage of it. I knew things were pretty bad with the police department but seeing the barrel of a gun in my face….If he kills me, he won’t be sanctioned.      It still kills me that it is not gonna be sanctioned. This was in Oakland, not like being out in Castro Valley or San Leandro or some other place that is probably more notorious. 

So to be in this neighborhood, and to know this history, and then to have this personal connection to know that my family specifically my people, have been contributing here in this neighborhood, to this city for decades and generations, it really creates this sense of belonging like this is our, this is my place.

Downs: One thing that strikes me is you really talk about that feeling as an asset, as an investment that really does work for people, affects people. The moments of beauty, the moments of activism, the Panther mural, that they aren’t just pretty or nice. They really are assets that people can draw upon. 

Peters: The moments of pain and suffering get fed back to me in the media, the negative things that happen. I’ve had to be like, Hey, I feel great about this stuff. They are investments. They are really things that one can draw upon to find sustenance. And I’ve heard people from the tour, particularly Black folks from the tour talk about, Wow, I’m proud to learn what I’ve learned, I’m proud of the way that you deliver it. They say, I’m from this neighborhood, and still I learned so much. And then you hear from people, who have things to add, you know, my family was from this part of Oakland or that part of Oakland, and here’s what I know about the churches, or here’s what I know about housing history.

Downs: What happens if a neighborhood loses those cultural assets? People talk about economic investment and health investment, but what if those murals go, those sites go, the knowledge goes?

Peters:  Well, it becomes a different place. It becomes a different place. Because I think it’s the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are and where we are that define us. And when those stories change, not only are those people’s contributions erased, but the absence of knowledge is irreparable. So the people who come later don’t realize what had happened here before. Walter Hood, the MacArthur grant winner, has a phrase: placemaking is re-colonizing. Every place has a history if you look for it, and so when we lose these histories, those become new places. And then the people who are here, if they don’t know these stories, are from a different culture. No matter what they look like, they are different culturally.

Click here to learn more about the Black Liberation Walking Tour

Downs: So what are the strategies you see working in historically Black urban neighborhoods for trying to preserve that? When you look around, they’re under threat almost everywhere, right? What’s working in your view? What should people do?

Peters:  I think what’s working is the archivists. We’ve got the African American Museum and Library here in Oakland, which came out of a couple of couples starting to collect Black historical artifacts in the 1940s over their storefront. And [the legendary and recently retired Oakland History librarian] Dorothy Lazard.  We are participants in the future history, so we have to be cognizant about preserving it. One of the things that is critical is the churches and we still see many displaced families commuting back into Oakland to come to these historical churches, which were once the only opportunities for organizing for black folks. But there’s a major, major decline is so many of our churches. 

The city of Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Department, whose budget is under great threat on the next budget that’s coming out, has belonging in Oakland as their theme, and they are intentionally funding groups with a particular intentional focus on Black and other communities of color to do cultural festivals, to create cultural assets, to assert a voice, and to create belonging in Oakland. 

We have to work with the people that have been here a long time but also invite in the people that are newer because so many times now people just don’t know about things. This energy of new folks coming in, that’s essential for healthy neighborhoods. New and old residents working together, that is really the key, and I think Oakland is saying that these things are important for Black communities here. One of the things I love about Oakland is there’s so many people who are just out here doing things, untutored, just doing it, doing it and figuring it out later. I love that energy, that activism.

Downs: History has taught them they can’t wait on somebody else. Well, we’re at the last question. One thing I’ve heard you say and one thing I tell my students is, history is everywhere, history is everybody. Every place has a history and some of them might be more interesting to us than others and every person comes from a history. But not every place has a tour like this and like the web of organizations that you and Ms. [Alternier Baker] Cook and other people set up.

If somebody is in a place where some of these stressors are happening, how do they get started? What’s your advice? They can’t wait for Dave Peters to move in and do it for them. So how do they get going?

Peters:  Talk to your neighbors. Just talk, be passionate. Just talk about it to everybody. And then talk to your family. If you’re interested in this particular cultural history, talk to elders in your family, talk to youth in your family and develop a family story. Just talking to somebody and asking them their story is affirming. It gets people going. 

Me, when I had this idea for this tour, it was kind of something inside that said I need to do this and I had no idea how to do it. So I just started talking to people about it, telling them, hey, I got this idea, I want to do this thing, just built up a fire about it and the things I needed, the funding that I needed, the people that I needed, fell into place. 

You know, I get really passionate about things. And one of the things I cultivated is like this. We’re sitting here on the front porch. I sit here and I try to speak to everybody, every neighbor, every passerby, just give them a wave, how it’s going. You know, we’re so much more isolated than we used to be, walking around with our AirPods. So for me, it is about being intentional, just talking to people in your community that are passing by. You know the Myers Briggs test says that I’m an introvert. [Laughter] But I have this sense of this obligation of, you know, loving this neighborhood and just wanting to build community here.

Dr. Gregory Downs is the department chair and professor of the History Department at UC Davis. He studies the political and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Excerpts

Justice and the Interstates: The Racist Truth about Urban Highways

on April 19, 2023

Latino Interchanges: Greater East Los Angeles in the Freeway Era

By: Gilbert Estrada and Jerry González

Why Eastside Los Angeles?

With a lack of Eastside financial capital, a dearth of political representation followed. Freeway planning can be an obscure top-down process, but freeway planning is also part of American democracy. After World War II, racism, gerrymandering, and voter suppression left Mexican Americans the most underrepresented group in L.A.17 Equitable political representation could have changed L.A.’s freeway landscape if local elected officials voted against freeways, which did occur in other Southland cities. California freeways were built by the state Division of Highways. The state needed approval from city governments in order to build freeways by signing a “freeway agreement” in order to close local streets, demolish or relocate properties, and construct freeways.18

With insufficient political representation, there was little or no political recourse Mexican Eastsiders could take, especially in the early years of freeway planning. For example, the Eastside Belvedere area was divided into three assembly districts and three congressional districts, ensuring that although Mexicans were the highest percentage of residents, they remained the lowest percentage within their voting district. During the two decades after World War II, the peak years of freeway construction, only one Mexican American, Edward Roybal, served on the Los Angeles Council; before his election, the last Mexican to serve on the council did so in 1881.19

With the Eastside facing freeway construction and because some folks had leveraged military service and wartime labor during World War II, many Eastside Latinos quietly joined their Jewish neighbors in saying goodbye to the neighborhood. One indicator of this outmigration of middle-class Latina/os is that they created wrinkles in suburban consumer markets as potential homebuyers and as retail spenders. In an unincorporated section of Los Angeles County near Whittier, three residential subdivisions opened by 1950 and specifically marketed to Mexican American war veterans.20 And in the San Gabriel Valley, merchants reportedly employed Mexican American associates in order to establish friendly consumer relations with prospective Latino/a clients.21 The sub- urban explosion over the next decade and a half included a burgeoning Latino/a homeowner class that exercised power in local communities outside of the Eastside while civic leaders decided how best to divide it.22 In East Los Angeles, the San Bernardino I-10 (1943), the Santa Ana I-5 (1944), and the Golden State Freeways (1955) were all designed to keep construction costs low. A key feature that governed the Division of Highways decisions centered on purchasing low-cost properties through the government mechanism of eminent domain while avoiding high-priced industrial-zoned properties. Heinz Heckeroth, who served as lead engineer in the East L.A. Interchange design and whose career spanned thirty-three years, noted his cost-effective approach. “I looked for the most expensive buildings and I said we can’t afford to buy them. If you begin to look in location from a right-of-way cost standpoint and you identify right-of-way controls, then you begin to pattern places in geometric locations which you can’t hit.” A Southwest Builder Contractor author also acknowledged, “State Highway engineers located the [free- way] route with very little disturbance to existing industrial properties.” A short list of industrial sites missed in East Los Angeles is the Times Mirror Catalog Warehouse (which sat untouched in the middle of the ELAI), the L.A. Union Stock Yard Railroad, the Sears Roebuck & Company building, and the Union Pacific Company Warehouse.23

In order to build this network of freeways, some 21,011 people were displaced in East Los Angeles, probably the largest per capita displacement in California history.24 Freeway displacements were not limited to households specifically in the path of the proposed freeways. The imposition of new roadways and its ancillary effects on quality of life spurred a migration out of the Eastside into surrounding suburbs. The years associated with highway and freeway expansion coincided with the development of myriad planned communities and commercial nodes. In the period Becky Nicolaides calls the era of the “Sitcom Suburb,” from 1940 to 1970, 75 percent of the housing structures in Los Angeles County were erected.25 However common suburbanization became, the sense of loss associated with being forced out by freeway development speaks to the deep communal ties to the neighborhoods forged by generations of multiracial and multiethnic place making. Whereas city planners viewed the city as a landscape for profit, community members placed intangible value on the belonging associated with their neighborhoods.

As careful as developers were to avoid major disruptions to commercial and industrial properties, they were equally detailed in their determinations about which houses to preserve and which to tear asunder. The Division of Highways instead cleared what they labeled as “sub- standard” East L.A. housing.26 Boyle Heights residents were accustomed to technocratic social control measures. City engineers had been operating in the area since before the Great Depression as they shaped the infrastructure and roads of the neighborhood. One engineer, Rex Thompson, even assumed leadership over the county welfare department, which would oversee Mexican repatriation efforts in the 1930s. Civic leaders viewed the local residents as disposable.27

Metropolitan Growth and the East L.A. Interchange

By 1950, Los Angeles was at the leading edge of suburban development as it grew in expanse and population more rapidly than did any other metropolitan region.28 Indeed, between 1940 and 1950 the county population almost doubled, from 2.78 to 4.15 million residents.29 Con- currently, the Latino population in the county grew from 61,248 to 249,173.30 Increased birth rate, immigration, and a significant interstate migration contributed to this boom. The Eastside became too small to contain this growing population. Freeway construction and over- crowding pushed Mexican Americans out of Eastside barrios and into expanding suburbs. And by 1960, Los Angeles reached a population of 2.5 million residents, with a metropolitan-wide population that had surpassed 6 million inhabitants.31 Also in that decade, the number of Latinos in Los Angeles County more than doubled to 582,309.32 A collective push into Montebello, Alhambra, San Gabriel, Pico Rivera, Whittier, Santa Fe Springs, Downey, West Covina, Baldwin Park, Lake- wood, and South Gate began to remake the racial geography of the region.

Where the I-10, I-5, US 101, and CA 60 all meet at the East Los Angeles Interchange, February 24, 2017. (Photo Credit: formulaone)

With an expanding, automobile-dependent populace, local and state governments made vital interventions that hastened freeway and high- way expansion in the postwar period: The Collier–Burns Act of 1947 in California allowed for special tax assessments on gasoline and other transportation services, and the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 authorized the construction of 41,000 miles of Interstate highways, ostensibly for defense purposes.33 The centerpiece of the entire Los Angeles freeway system resides in Boyle Heights. First opened in 1961 as part of John F. Kennedy’s National Highway Week, the East Los Angeles Interchange remains one of the largest and busiest interchanges in the world. Originally designed as a simple “Y” interchange, it was increased in size threefold by the Division of Highways.34 It’s so large, the ELAI could actually be three separate interchanges and is several stories high, according to Heinz Heckeroth, who also conveyed the importance of the East L.A. Interchange: “During the time, [that] was it, [the East L.A. Interchange] was the enchilada, the whole thing.” In 1958, the Division of Highways claimed that the interchange’s widest point was twenty-seven lanes.35 But according to modern satellite imaging, at least thirty automotive traffic lanes exist; including emergency lanes, there are forty-eight lanes at its widest point.36 The East L.A. Interchange is also the nexus between L.A.’s downtown civic center and the suburbs. The interchange is the start of the Hollywood 101 Freeway. It is the transition point for the Golden State Freeway and Santa Ana 5 Free- way and the place where the Santa Monica Freeway becomes the San Bernardino 10 Freeway. The interchange also is the beginning of the Pomona 60 Freeway. These words scarcely describe the impact felt by the community. Satellite imaging and living in the community provide a better understanding of what six freeways, interconnecting lanes, on- ramps, off-ramps, emergency lanes, freeway lighting, walls, shrubbery, and noise and exhaust have created for Boyle Heights residents.

During the planning of the ELAI, two central transportation goals arose: enable transportation to eastern suburbs and facilitate transportation to downtown Los Angeles, specifically retail and corporate offices. The freeway was intended partially to ensure downtown capitalism; L.A. freeways were intensely lobbied for by corporate interests. “If the central [business center] is to survive, they must replace some of the business lost. The new highway networks are helping to make this possible,” noted the American Automobile Association in a 1961 article republished by the Division of Highways in their bimonthly magazine, California Highway and Public Works. The 16-page report published by the state planning agency touted billion-dollar corporations and the millions they invested in downtown L.A., and it stressed the downtown business community’s demand for freeways. To downtown corporations, freeways represented a direct route to their new offices and also meant customers. Eric Avila has also explored the influence of the Downtown Businessmen’s Association and its pursuit of freeways to serve the city’s downtown. The association’s lobbying proved so successful, planners and business leaders raved over the “critical key” the East Los Angeles Interchange provided. Not all civic leaders shared the elation over freeway plans. Congressional representative Edward Roybal recalled that the State Highway Commis- sion approved construction of the Golden State 5 Freeway despite the community’s protest against it.37

Of course, the value that people placed on a home imbued with love, struggle, pain, and poetry did not align with developers’ understanding of value, which privileged the investment market. Although they were paltry remuneration given the importance most people placed on their home and community, the state buyout checks that replaced the homes seized for development enabled some families to combine the cash with GI Bill benefits and savings in order to reestablish themselves in nearby suburbs such as Pico Rivera and Montebello. Many of the people who made this move were influenced by the proximity to their Eastside com- munities and access to the very freeways that displaced them, making work commutes easier.

Many ELAIs: The Case of Jimtown

The East L.A. Interchange provided a model for how other Los Ange- les–area neighborhoods experienced eminent domain, displacement, and freeway construction. The introduction of the freeway system to rural San Gabriel Valley remade it into a suburban appendage to Los Angeles’s burgeoning economic opportunities; at the same time, it sub- urbanized the uneven costs for vulnerable communities.38 In 1954, the California Highway Commission announced plans for a San Gabriel River Freeway to run north and south from Lakewood to a junction with the San Bernardino Freeway between El Monte and Covina. The proposed freeway aimed to reduce congestion on north–south city and county highways and link with freeway flows to Santa Ana and down- town Los Angeles. Scattered resistance to the freeway originated from White homeowners, while suburban municipalities worked to rezone areas adjacent to the right of way.39 The proposed route straddled the San Gabriel River and cut through a network of colonias, Flood Ranch in Santa Fe Springs, and Jimtown in an unincorporated neighborhood between Whittier and Pico.40 Jimtown’s fate might have been influenced by preceding technocratic measures. The HOLC redlined Jim- town in similar yet distinct terms from Boyle Heights. Whereas Boyle Heights’s multiracial and multicultural diversity induced HOLC surveyors to stamp it with a hazardous grade, the federal agency specifically cited Jimtown’s Mexican residents in its assessment that “the area is generously accorded a ‘low red’ grade.”41 On the 1939 neighborhood appraisal, the area is described as San Gabriel Wash & Whittier Way, which described its location between the frequently flooding plain for the San Gabriel River and State Route 72, Whittier Boulevard. Of the finer points that led to its debilitating HOLC evaluation, the appraiser noted that the community was comprised of Mexicans, “many American born—impossible to differentiate.” Moreover, the “shacks and hovels” that housed these families invited the “infiltration of goats, rabbits, and dark-skinned babies.” The spatial racial analysis labeled Jimtown “an extremely old Mexican shack district” with “no pride of ancestry or hope of posterity.” In the eyes of the surveyor, it amounted to nothing more than a “typical semi tropical countryside slum.” Yet despite the vivid demarcation outside the bounds of modern Los Angeles, the evaluator noted that a bus line on Whittier Boulevard connected Jimtown residents to a rapidly sprawling labor market.42

Metropolitan development surrounding Jimtown introduced staggered processes of displacement and subsequent investment and dis- investment. The introduction of the railroad lines along the western edge of the neighborhood in 1940 brought noise pollution and deadly encounters with the trains. In July 1940, a train struck and killed sixty- five-year-old Juan Garavito as he collected firewood to warm the home he shared with his mother. In 1955, as county leaders ramped up efforts to clear the community to make way for the freeway, renters and community homeowners attempted to save their community by complying with mandates to self-improve houses and infrastructure.43 Despite the promises to preserve residences by county leaders, more than half of the community was razed so that the 605 San Gabriel Freeway could connect suburbs to the city.

A reunion of displaced Jimtown residents in 1982 attested to the strength of community bonds established over decades. Although the freeway reduced the former community to fifty homes on an island accessible by one street in and out of the neighborhood, the family ties ran deep. Contrary to the claims made by the HOLC surveyor, the com- munity did have pride and posterity. Despite the discursive treatment of Jimtown as impoverished and crime-ridden, it marks a significant place in the history of Latino suburban struggles for inclusion and persists to this day at the northbound Whittier Boulevard exit off the 605 Freeway. Many of the displaced residents joined the suburban migration like their counterparts on the Eastside. Given their proximity to communities in Whittier, El Monte, Norwalk, Pico Rivera, and, after the construction of the freeway, to the entire metropolis, folks dispersed in search of new places to call home.44

LA District Map VII, January 1, 1959. (Photo Credit: California Highways and Public Roads)

Going Home Again

The Eastside lacked spectacular revolts against freeway expansion and therefore did not witness dramatic successes of other communities that fought freeway development, such as the ongoing resistance to the expansion of the 710 Freeway to connect with the 210 Freeway in Pasadena.45 Instead, the resistance played out silently, and perhaps more artistically, as Eastside residents adopted the freeway system as their own canvas and made it part of their local identities.46 Famed artist and muralist Judith Baca painted a bright and powerful rejoinder to the freeway devastation

of the Eastside in her Great Wall of Los Angeles, a sweeping mural of local histories of dispossession and community resistance. Johana Londoño notes that Chicana/o political muralists sought to tell the stories of their barrios in brightly colored imagery in an effort to reclaim control of their narrative and exercise a modicum of control over a landscape that was so thoroughly imbued with colonial expressions.47

When freeway construction ended in the early 1970s with a county population around 7 million, seven freeways criss-crossed the Mexican American Eastside. The small community is also home to one of the busiest diesel truck corridors in the state, the I-710 Long Beach Freeway, and six interchanges, including one of the busiest interchanges in the world, the ELAI, which facilitates at least 1.78 million vehicles a day. The traffic total for the Eastside Interchange is approximately 5 mil- lion vehicles a day.48 This extended network of freeways and highways served the population that L.A. county and city leaders had planned for decades. Perhaps an unintended byproduct of freeway planning, the di- versification of suburban Los Angeles yielded communities that harked back to Boyle Heights’s wonderfully cosmopolitan community.

In September 1979, Keith Takahashi, a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times, published an article celebrating the diversity of Montebello, an independent suburb 10 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. By declaring the town a “melting pot” worthy of the title “U.N. of Southeast [Los Angeles County],” Takahashi signaled that the booming diversity of Los Angeles’s suburbs marked a transition point in American racial and ethnic democracy, one that figured to deliver the promise of equality to the residential landscape that had come to be associated so markedly with structural racism and exclusion.49 Freeway displacement did in fact create racialized distinctions between Whites and people of color in every major metropolitan area across the United States; however, in Los Angeles the process was not so linear, nor so complete. As urban renewal projects displaced Latina/os from the Eastside, many of them moved

further east into the increasingly Brown suburbs. Thus, it was not only White folks who flew unconsciously over the freeways past the once-be-loved communities. Many Latinos did so as well, but most continued to visit the communities to which they once belonged, repeatedly renewing their ties to place. And even though some of the barrios that housed Mexican Americans for generations were bulldozed and gone, the memories of those places persist and remain symbolic homes for Angelenos who never saw those neighborhoods with their own eyes or touched their feet to the pavement that meant so much to prior generations.

SOURCES

17. Rodolfo F. Acuña, A Community under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945–1975 (Los Angeles: Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 1984), 103–6.

18. Heinz Heckeroth, interviewed by Gilbert Estrada, July 2001, Sacramento, California; “Planning,” California Highway and Public Works (November–December 1962): 45; Ralph W. Keith, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. John A. Volpe, et al., United States District Court, Ninth Circuit, February 16, 1972, California State Archives. For example, twenty-seven freeway agreements were needed to build the 105 Century Freeway. See also “Freeway Agreements and Route Matters,” https://dot.ca.gov/programs/design/freeway-agreements-route-matters. The Division of Highways was changed to CALTRANS in 1973.

19. Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, “Cultural Needs Assessment: Metro Red Line East Side Extension,” 1995, iv–7; Leonard Pitt and Dale Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 251, 281, 442. Edward Roybal was elected to the Los Angeles Council in 1949. No Mexican American served on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors until 1991.

20. “Throngs Inspect New Development in South Whittier,” Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1950, E2.

21. “Se Habla Espanol,” Vida News, 13 November 1963, vol. 1, no. 4, pg. 2, in Box 20, Folder 2, Eduardo Quevedo Papers, M0349, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

22. See Jerry González, In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills: Latino Suburbanization in Postwar Los Angeles (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2017), chapters 2 and 3.

23. “Freeway Procedure,” California Highway and Public Works (May–June 1948): 14–16; A. N. George, “Work on New Santa Ana Freeway in Los Angeles Is Well Under Way,” California Highway and Public Works (March– April 1946): 25–26; “New Freeway,” California Highway and Public Works (July–August 1948): 1, 14–18; “Santa Ana Freeway Paving Starts Oct.: Two Overcrossings Scheduled in Project,” Southwest Builder Contractor, July 12, 1946.

24. Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Boyle Heights Community Plan Background Report (Los Angeles: City of Los Angeles, 1974), 47; Barrio Planners, Inc., “Nuestro Ambiente: East Los Angeles Visual Survey and Analysis” (Los Angeles, 1973), 50; Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Boyle Heights Community Plan: A Part of the General Plan of the City of Los Angeles (Los Angeles, adopted 1979), 4; City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning, ARC GIS data, email from Public Relations Specialist, January 2022.

25. Becky Nicolaides, “Suburban Landscapes of Los Angeles,” in Wim De Wit and Christopher James Alexander, eds., Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2013), 128.

26. “Freeway Procedure,” 14–16; George, “Work on New Santa Ana Freeway in Los Angeles Is Well Under Way,” 25–26; “New Freeway,” 1, 14–18; “Santa Ana Freeway Paving Starts Oct.”

27. George J. Sánchez, “Disposable People, Expendable Neighborhoods,” in Greg Hise and William Deverell, eds., Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles (New York: Wiley, 2010), 132.

28. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier, 238–39.

29. Becky Nicolaides, My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920–1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 219.

30. Philip J. Ethington, William H. Frey, and Dowell Myers, “The Racial Resegregation of Los Angeles County, 1940–2000,” Race Contours 2000 Study, Public Research Report no. 2001-04 (Los Angeles: School of Policy, Planning, and Development, University of Southern California, May 12, 2001), 10.

31. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 26.

32. Ethington et al., “The Racial Resegregation of Los Angeles County,” 10.

33. Ryan Reft, “The Future Fulfilled?: Modernism’s Effect on the California We Know Today,” KCET, November 6, 2019, https://www.kcet.org /shows/lost-la/the-future-fulfilled-modernisms-effect-on-the-california-we-know-today.

34. “Design of Interchange Was a Team Effort,” California Highway and Public Works (November–December 1958): 20–22; Heinz Heckeroth, interviewed by Gilbert Estrada, July 2001, Sacramento, California; Liam Dillon and Ben Poston, “Freeways Force Out Residents in Communities of Color—Again,” Los Angeles Times (November 11, 2021).

35. Heinz Heckeroth, interviewed by the Gilbert Estrada, July 2001, Sacramento, California; “Design of Interchange Was a Team Effort,” 20–22; “Model of New Freeway Interchange Displayed,” Los Angeles Times, September 3, 1958.

36. Talk by E. T. Telford, assistant state highway engineer, presented before ASCE Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, April 13, 1961, “The East Los Angeles Interchange”; “Design of Interchange Was a Team Effort,” 20–22; “National Highway Week Observed,” California Highway and Public Works (May–June 1961): 1; “Huge East Los Angeles Interchange Dedicated,” Los Angeles Times, May 24, 1961. The Interchange is at least 135 acres.

37. “Mexican American Study Project; Community Advisory Committee Meeting, Statler Hilton Hotel,” September 26, 1964, Eduardo Quevedo  Papers, M0349, box 4, folder 6, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

38. Ryan Reft, “Transportational El Monte: From the Red Car to the Freeway,” in Romeo Guzmán et al., eds., East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020), 197–98.

39. “San Gabriel River Freeway Route Proposed,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1954, A2; “Homeowners Form Freeway Committee,” Los Angeles Times, June 19, 1955, SC3; “Council to Buy Parkway Land in Pico Rivera,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1959, E11.

40. Florentino Aguirre recalled that people in the colonias surrounding Pico Rivera in East L.A., Whittier, Los Nietos, Downey, Montebello, San Gabriel, Azusa, El Monte, and Hayes regularly came together for Mexican Independence and other celebrations in Streamland Park, a small amusement park and green space on the edge of Pico Rivera near Jimtown. See Florentino Aguirre interview by Vince Ponce and Maggie McNamara, in Personal Stories from the Pio Pico Neighborhood (Whittier, CA: Rio Hondo College, 1978), 12.

41. HOLC appraisal of “San Gabriel Wash & Whittier Way” area of Los Angeles County, Los Angeles City Survey Files, Area Descriptions, Home Owner’s Loan Corporation, Record Group 195, National Archives, Washington DC, 1939, Doc # D-57. See also Becky Nicolaides and Andrew Wiese, eds., The Suburb Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 243 and chapter 8; and González, In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills, 20–1.

42. Ibid.

43. “Wood Gleaner Killed by Train; Supported Mother, Aged 105,” Los Angeles Times, July 12, 1940, A3; “Annexation Vote for Jimtown Set at Whittier,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 1951, A6; Charles Gould, “Sleepy Jimtown Responds to ‘Clean Up or Else’ Order,” Los Angeles Times, March 13, 1955, F1.

44. Lynn Simross, “Digging Up Roots of a Former Mexican Barrio: Former Residents of Jimtown Gather for First Reunion,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 1984, OC_C1.

45. Tim Ivison and Julia Tcharfas, “710: Excerpts from the Archive,” Off-ramp 16 (summer 2019), https://offramp.sciarc.edu/articles/710-excerpts-from-the-archive.

46. Eric Avila, “L.A.’s Invisible Freeway Revolt: The Cultural Politics of Fighting Freeways,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 5 (2014): 831–42.

47. Johana Londoño, Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 98–99.

48. “Traffic Census Program,” https://dot.ca.gov/programs/traffic-operations/census.

49. Keith Takahashi, “Montebello: U.N. of Southeast: Well-Ordered Community Is a Melting-Pot,” Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1979, SE 1.

Gilbert Estrada is an associate professor of history & ethnic studies at Long Beach City College.

Jerry González is an associate professor of history at The University of Texas at San Antonio.

ArticlesInterviews

Think Like a Watershed: An Interview with Environmental Analyst and Historian Char Miller

on April 19, 2023

At the start of a new year, BOOM California editors sat to talk with Char Miller, environmental historian and director of environmental analysis at Pomona College in Claremont, California. A senior fellow of the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, and a fellow of the Texas State Historical Association and of the Forest History Society, Miller is the author of numerous important books including West Side Rising: How San Antonio’s 1921 Flood Devastated a City and Sparked a Latino Environmental Justice Movement (2021), Hetch Hetchy: A History in Documents (2020), Theodore Roosevelt: Naturalist in the Arena(2020); and Elers Koch’s memoir, Forty Years a Forester; The Nature of Hope: Environmental Justice, Grassroots Organizing and Political Change (2019).

We talked with Char Miller about his new book, Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril to gain insight into the evolution of environmental history and the importance of centering place and story. The conversation takes on the advances in environmental justice, the inclusion of indigenous knowledge into Western science and environmentalism, and the art and purpose of storytelling.

Our conversation concludes with his analysis and critique of California’s historical abuse of the natural environment, continuing the practice of extraction of the natural environment in favor of developmentalism, and what COVID taught us about the inequities of illness.

Ultimately, Miller guides us to find hope in justice work done in localized, situated communities by students, civilians, activists, and other stewards of culture and nature. 

BOOM

Where or when did you develop an interest in environmental history?

Char Miller

I think partly my interest in environmental history is biographical, as it is for anybody when they think about their career and why they make certain choices. I grew up in New England where it was, in retrospect, obvious that the places I loved had some deep kind of history—a history that I only could scratch the surface of as a kid. But I was aware of it, right? This history was in the names of buildings, streets, and landscapes that we would distinguish now as either settler or indigenous names. Obviously, in time, I went, “Oh, yeah! That’s important.”

But it’s also probably even more important that in 1981 I moved to San Antonio—a city that I had only previously traveled through—and put down roots there for twenty-six years. And time matters a lot. You sit in a place for a period of time and that place becomes important if you’re trying to figure out your relationship to it.

I was very fortunate that I came with a particular eye to a city that I really did not understand. I grew up around New York City, so I understood how those kinds of cities worked and San Antonio didn’t work that way at all. It was every bit segregated. It was every bit as complex. It just didn’t look like it. So during this time I was becoming and being observant about the place I lived in.

What started to come together in San Antonio was that I began to think like a watershed. See, I lived close to one of the city’s watersheds and I passed it all the time—driving through it at some inopportune times when it was not smart to do (Miller laughs). I suddenly realized, “Wait for a second, these things are actually kind of dangerous.” If you live in flood zones, you need to be thinking about this. Literally, I started looking around and realized that that particular city, which flooded all the time, had been making efforts to try to not flood all the time. The analogy for those of us in California is we’re watching fires burn everywhere. We’re trying to figure out why we live in fire zones in the ways that people in San Antonio tried to figure out why they lived in a house that could flood. That didn’t make a lot of sense. So, it was the watershed concept that made me realize that once you start to think like a watershed or like a fire, you begin to reorient how you understand the landscape and your relationship to it. That’s a policy question. It’s a personal question. It’s a political question.

The longer I lived in San Antonio, it became clear that it was highly segregated around watersheds. Some watersheds had flood control. Some watersheds didn’t. Why was that? I started digging in archives and walking the streets trying to figure it out. It wasn’t that hard. It was very clear that from the nineteenth century onward the whiter you were the more likely it was you lived on higher ground. The darker your skin the more likely it was you were living closer to creeks and or rivers. One group was in the position to save themselves because they were able, and the other couldn’t and didn’t.

You know, that’s sort of a brief description of environmental injustice, but for me, it was really living in San Antonio where I learned the concept of waterways and applied it in a lot of different ways and in a lot of different places.

California Water Map

BOOM

I like this watershed concept as a departure, as a way of introducing ecological thinking, interpretation, or understanding. To me, this concept ties us to your working position in environmental analysis and history at Pomona University. It reflects the recognition of interdisciplinarity in environmental discourse. Subfields, like environmental history, have emerged as subject-focused disciplines in recent years, but this hasn’t always been the case in academia—especially, for older disciplines like history. I’m wondering if you could discuss or elaborate on environmental history’s evolution into an interdisciplinary field and practice.

Char Miller

That’s a great question. I actually learned this process in San Antonio when I was teaching at Trinity University. I began to teach environmental history in addition to history in the urban studies program. There, it was highly interdisciplinary: politics, policy, history, anthropology, and archeology. Then, there was this whole cluster of folks doing economics. I went, “Oh, this is how you do it! Right?”

And a light bulb went off. I applied what we did there to what we have now done here within the 5C (Five Claremont Colleges) Environmental Analysis program. We draw from faculty in all disciplines. And I am a sponge and absorb stuff from all sides and am willing to ask the dumbest questions in order to learn different perspectives, intellectual histories, and theoretical tools. I would say I am surely not the smartest person in the room when I get together with my colleagues but I will do the work it takes to reorient, recenter myself, and be guided by what is provided in the room.  

It has been an extraordinary experience that is largely counter to the way environmental history as a subfield appeared in the late sixties, and early seventies when as a subfield it emerged from essentially two streams. One was that almost everybody was an activist. They were academics, but also activists in their orientation. The orientation tended to be framed as the activism was back then. The second was… let’s call it preservationist. It was a kind of John Muir-like approach to landscapes where what one was trying to do was to protect the wild, however, you defined it. And it almost always was out there, somewhere—whether it be in the San Gabriel Mountains or the Rockies or the Sierra, wherever. But it was someplace removed from where we all lived. The notion that wilderness was a place where people weren’t, utterly erased indigenous knowledge and present-day indigenous presence. In that regard, it was quite a settler-colonial way of thinking about landscapes that we now have the language to describe. But one could have argued that it was imperialistic, right? That we as settlers just declared this place to be empty. And, to do that you’ve got to really do the hard heavy lifting of colonialism and imperialism—the material/physical attempt at eradicating whole populations of people. Just to assume that the Miwok are not in Yosemite and that the Paiute are not in the Eastern Sierra, basin and range region, means someone really got out their erasers and started doing exactly that.

The erasures in the last fifteen, maybe even twenty years, have really changed markedly as people began to recognize that the very institutions like the Forest Service, Park Service, and then their state analogs that were there to protect and preserve, were handmaidens to the hard and heavy colonial erasure as part of the process. It wasn’t just: you’re protecting the wild. It was you’re protecting it for certain kinds of people to recreate their own space through creating laws not to hunt, not to fish, and not to recover ritual objects in the light.

And god forbid you should have a fire! Got to put that out real fast! Suppressing fire is also part of a racist structure that was designed by the Spanish, for goodness sakes, in the eighteenth century. It’s a way in which you destroy indigenous life practices.

So, we’ve gotten a lot savvier, a lot more aware. Environmental historians and other academics are largely driven by young people, not unlike yourself, who have come into the world seeing things in different ways and articulating them through different lenses and frameworks. When I go to environmental history sessions now or go to the Western Historical Association Conference, it is a completely different ballgame.  I was at the WHA in San Antonio this fall, and the number of borderland sessions and the sessions about environmental injustices astounded me. I was chatting with younger students there and they take this now as the norm. I said, “No, no, no… Let me tell you… I could have walked these halls fifteen years ago and there wouldn’t have been one of these conversations going on; let alone any students of color here.” It’s a totally different game. This is great because it means that the field and the practices within it, and the perspectives that drive the work that people are doing, have done this incredible, revolutionary transformation. It’s extremely exciting! Plus, I get to bring this into a classroom, with undergraduate and graduate students who are every bit as diverse as the state.

It went from being one kind of thing to another. In part because we’re looking at urban environments and in part because we’re looking at environmental injustices, which are often urban in their orientation. We’re thinking about indigenous sovereignty at so many different levels. But the land is centered in that question, which suddenly decenters the role of Euro/white/western interpretation and management of nature and the environment–the world that I was trained to gather knowledge and interpret reality as a graduate student. Things are blossoming in ways that I could never have imagined forty plus years ago. I think it’s made me a much better historian.

Illustration by Sophie Wood Brinker

BOOM

So, you know, as it’s a California-based journal, perhaps we can touch on some California-specific subjects. With your research and insight on fire, water, and public lands, what do you think are some of the more urgent environmental issues in California today?

Char Miller

Well, let’s start with the key issues. Let’s use Los Angeles and the Bay Area as examples. Here are these behemoth metropolitan areas that are confronted with different kinds of issues—although, in many cases, fire and the smoke that those fires produce are similar for both, despite the differences between north and south. But among the challenges they face, they are working to make the metropolitan as resilient as possible given the climatological changes that we’re seeing already. Fire is an example of that. These intense storms that blew in this month (January 2023) are directly related at some level to the increased moisture in the air, as a consequence of higher sea levels for example. The coastal damage is just mind-boggling because of the power of these tremendous atmospheric rivers and the damage that they can do.

So, we need to make these places more resilient. How do we do it? Traditionally, what we have done in a very settler approach is to build more walls, reroute rivers, armor beaches—and just concretize. Just like how the LA River has been concretized, and every other river virtually in the state that has been dammed and channeled to be diverted in one way or another. That’s one way of approaching it, but it’s also a highly brittle solution to what is a very fluid problem in every respect. Some of this is recognizing that if we’re really going talk about resilience one of the things we need to do is to ask whether we need to be building in high fire severity zones, even though we’ve got a housing problem. I would argue no. What kind of policy is it that says, “We need housing, so let’s put housing in a floodplain?” So, then you flood. Or, let’s put housing in a fire zone because we need housing and if it burns, it becomes not a wildfire, but a structure fire.

Okay? So that’s one problem. If that’s the problem, the solution is to step away from those places. That’s what we should be thinking in terms of policy. That’s as true in San Diego on those houses that overlook the eroding cliffs, as it is in Santa Barbara, where those cliffs are also tumbling into the ocean, as it is in Cambria and places like Half Moon Bay. Pull back for goodness’ sake! It’s a hard thing for us to do because our settler instinct is, “Screw nature, we’re going master this thing.” Well, we know we don’t master it. Let’s get over that

I think for California, it isn’t just recognizing that there are a lot of conversions that are taking place: land conversion, oceanic conversion, and other things. All of that is going on, but our policy needs to be flexible, and as thoughtful as it has been inflexible and unthoughtful before. That requires a recognition that the tools that we have can be better managed and better used to produce better results than the normal course of events would suggest. And we’re talking since the Gold Rush. If we look at the intense settlement of this state, the goal has always been build a levy, create a channel, put a house wherever you want to put a house, lay it right on top of the fault lines. Who cares? That’s just such bad thinking and we know better. That’s the piece that really bothers me. We know better, and yet we still make the same decisions and choices.

Natural Consequences was designed, at least in part, to raise the question about the choices that we make so that we can make different choices that will allow us to live here in ways that we would like to do by the end of the century. This is where I think history can speak to the present. I mean, it hasn’t gone away. The past is sticky. It’s right next to us. It’s in us. But if we start to rethink how we write history, then one of the things that the rewriting of history can help us do is to change our present practices and the future choices that the present might develop.

BOOM

Speaking of history, what do you think were some of the more critical or impactful moments in California’s environmental history?

Char Miller

Wow. Okay. Let’s use Los Angeles because it’s here and has been studied a lot. I think the way to center this is on a set of decisions that are built in various ways that changed life in Los Angeles and changed life elsewhere because of these decisions. So, the obvious place to go is water, and the way the power brokers of this city in the early part of the twentieth century decided that if Metropolitan LA was actually to become one of the great cities of the planet, then it needed a much better water system than it currently had. They had a problem, which is the LA River, unchanneled, went wherever the LA River wanted to go, from Santa Monica down to Long Beach.

We looked at that and thought, “Huh, that’s pretty good.” It was a cool river when it flowed but, you know, floods are damaging. And so, you are going do one thing to local water supplies—you’re going channel it to flush it out to the ocean. But in doing so you’ve just disrupted the geological process whereby that water percolated into your aquifer, so you don’t have enough water for 500,000 people. The current population of LA County is 10 million. So, you go get other people’s water. First, you tap Owens River Valley and sluice that water through the LA Aqueduct. Then, you move up to Mono Lake and get that water as well. So that’s one set of exploitations that has a far-reaching effect on the life that could have been lived by the Paiute and white settlers up in the Eastern Sierra.

But we’ve just circumscribed that, which is problem number two. Now you go get the Colorado River and make your pitch for that water. We’re still fighting over that water with all the other states that have rights to its flow.

Problem number three is, well then let’s go get Northern California snow melt that will drop behind the Oroville Dam and Shasta Dam and others, and then sluice through the valley for agriculture and then get down to Los Angeles. Brilliant engineering, I don’t disagree with that. The technology that they produced is kind of amazing. It generated electricity that furthered this city’s power and its population growth, but it comes with problems not only for places whose water was siphoned off in various directions but also in systems, that depending on what the climate gives us, may not work the way that we thought might be possible. The Colorado River’s deep loss of water over this past drought and these major rains aren’t going to do much, at least in the long term, to solve that problem. It is a smoke signal.

This is a dilemma that we must face because 40 million people use that water. So, we’ve got to reorient that process. For Los Angeles, it’s also this extraordinary outward thrust of its population that is now filling in the Mojave—let alone what had already filled in all the way up to Santa Clarita, and the big housing developments at Taho Ranch Centennial and other things that are being planned in San Diego. All of these are consistent with the suburbanization of this region that began in the twenties, framed around the first street cars and railroads and now automobiles. This is utterly unsustainable—completely unsustainable.

“California a guide to the Golden state – Bed of the All-American Canal” by Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration of Northern California

The impulse to pull people towards the center as opposed to moving people to the periphery is a dilemma of huge proportions, but it’s the thing that’s going to make these places more resilient. They will use less water because urbanites use less water than those who water their lawns. Again, no one’s really surprised by that. It means that the desert might stay a desert, which would be a healthy thing for those habitats. Yet because we have the water, we can move it around the way we want to, but I don’t think that’s going to be a sustainable solution by the end of this century. I don’t think it’s sustainable at this moment.

The third piece is about transportation and movement and how we get around this terrain. It was the rail lines and streetcar lines, which really created the thrust of suburbanization in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Then the car expanded this exponentially. We’re suddenly realizing rail lines make sense, but that historic pattern of car transportation systems is the one we’re trying to recreate now at billions of dollars to retrofit this system. Because in fact, the very use of fossil fuels for driving is one major source of the very climate change that’s driving the fires, driving the storms, and making this place drier and hotter. Meaning it’s a lot more difficult to live with it.

I can see the ways in which these systems were emerging over time that I think are central to the way in which we need to rebuild these communities, so that in fact, future cohorts, future generations can still live in this place. I don’t think it’s going to happen fast enough. So, what’s interesting for me in thinking about the larger Southwest, which I’ve lived in for more than forty years, from San Antonio to California, is that those populations exploded after World War II and became exponentially larger. I mean, Phoenix was like 60,000 people and it’s now three-to-four million in the Valley of the Sun. El Paso, Tucson, Albuquerque, you name the place, it’s gotten huge because they had access to water and cheap energy. Well, water is now expensive. Energy is expensive. One of the things that’s starting to happen is that after the grandparents who left Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit and maybe even Duluth to find places that were warmer, wetter, and also cheaper–now their grandchildren or great-grandchildren are already going back to the Great Lakes where twenty-percent of the world’s freshwater supplies are located. So, I think movement is actually going to be in the demographics at the end of this century because I don’t think we can move quickly enough to protect LA or San Francisco or Portland or Seattle.

The final piece I would point to is the ecological challenges that we face. We have wiped out so many habitats and species that it’s beyond counting at this point. We have charismatic species like salmon as an example. The steelhead trout that used to run in the LA River and every river in this region now haven’t in maybe eight years. But if we could recover them, it would mean we’d have to change the way in which these rivers function, in order to make them function in a way more closely aligned to the world that they existed in before the concrete got thrown around. I think that’s a worthy goal to think about: These species are always indicators of the biological health of a region. That includes birds, bees, butterflies, and everything else, but it also includes aquatic species. The irony is we’ve done a pretty good job with the seals, elephant seals, and sea lions and they have started to recover. But it’s the species on which they feed that have tended to be overlooked and have not so much recovered. They have to make those transitions. We’ve got to be highly sentient, which we claim we are, but we don’t act that way very much.

So again, Natural Consequences is partly designed to reflect on my own complicity in the systems that I decry. It is to call the question on myself because it’s easier to do than to say to somebody else, “Oh man, you know, you don’t see yourself. You’re implicated in all of this.” But the goal is really to both acknowledge my implications and to acknowledge that even if we are implicated, we can argue for a different kind of system, and in fact, we must.

Illustration by Sophie Wood Brinker

BOOM

How has the inclusion of indigenous knowledge shaped, corrected, or unlearned perhaps some of the less positive approaches of environmental history?

Char Miller

Wow. Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question and it’s huge. So let me try to give you a set of responses. The first is that indigenous scholars, and those sensitive to the work that they are doing, are completely rewriting the textbook version that we all have gone through at one point or another—whether it was in high school or in college. The textbook begins on the east coast and moves West. It’s a rare textbook and a very sophisticated one that says, “Wait, wait, wait… the Spanish move north, the Comanche (or Nʉmʉnʉʉ) are moving south. These other people that are coming east, west… they’re like a sideshow, for a very long time.” And so, literally, the construct of what US History looked like has changed because Andrés Reséndez and other people he studied with really went, “Wait, no, no… that’s not how this works.”

The geography of knowledge has shifted and the orientation that one might have had has shifted. Partly for me, that was moving to San Antonio and realizing that its history, particularly its colonial history, was nothing like Massachusetts. It is this clash of Indigenous and invader that I needed to recognize, and it totally changed how I taught US History. I mean, I literally took the book and threw it out. I no longer used the various textbooks I had back in the day because they just didn’t work. And for me, that was remarkable because I had grown up in New England and all that history was from that vantage point. Now the narrative of history has altered. And I think the centering and decentering of various voices and perspectives, and landscapes in the case of environmental history, have also changed.

Also, I think pragmatically about it, being a writer. In recognizing these transformations, we put different voices in the text, partly because you can and partly because you must. Natural Consequences, like Westside Rising, its predecessor, are not linked in any way except in this one. I couldn’t write about a devastating flood in San Antonio and simply use the normal sources—which were white newspapers. I had to find other sources and I was lucky that some of them had been digitized. The Spanish-language newspapers were great resources I could pull into the text. And given who I am, I had to do that work, right? I could not just replicate the old story framed around the same resources because one, people have told the story well and two, it has always been from one vantage point.

I’ve got an obligation to be something different than that. So, Natural Consequences also plays this out in the introduction which refers to Charles Sepulveda’s essay, “Sacred Waters about the Santa Ana River.” I have taught this essay now for maybe five years and I just taught it yesterday with my students because it’s a key text inside the environmental analysis curriculum. I really loved the way in which he talked about a river, which is right outside our doorway here. We don’t tend to think about it (speaking of watersheds) but a lot of our water in Claremont flows into Santa Ana. But it’s not recentering Charles because Charles doesn’t need me to do that. It’s getting my students and myself to recognize that, as he says, “There’s a host and we’re guests.”

That’s the responsibility—what kind of guest am I going to be? We already know what bad guests do. They extract. They erase. They exploit. And it’s like, “Okay, we can’t do that. Fine.” So, what’s a good guest?  Or simply, what does just a better guest do? And part of that questioning has forced me, and many in the profession, to think about different resources or sources and voices. Because different voices in the text decenters you as an author to narrate in a way that is designed, not only to do the academic rigor piece that we all appreciate and admire but also to speak to audiences that are not us. We’ve learned to write in a voice that is much more accessible, which is what I think Sepulveda has also done. It is to reach out to people who look like me and say, “Look, here’s a different way to think about the world you and I occupy, that you and I have privilege in, that you and I have not thought through as carefully as we might, and to use his framing as a way to get at that and also to use ecological notions of place.” Because place really, really matters and places are different.

We need to be thinking about those differences, not just as we so often do in history. You know, you write a book about say, San Antonio or Claremont for that matter, and somebody goes, “Well what’s it related to? What’s it like? Is it like New York? Is it like Chicago? Is it like Boston?” That’s that same mentality: That the only things that are important are those big behemoths back east. But we live in a different kind of landscape. You’ve got to claim an ecological notion that site matters, whether a habitat or a community and do that work because that is what we’re obliged to do.

The final piece of this is to recognize that in adding ecological and indigenous sources of knowledge, which are much more complementary than they were ever perceived to be back in the day, is to acknowledge that Western science does not know all. It was the belief that Western science could answer all our questions. As it turns out it didn’t, and it doesn’t. Fire has been really important in this regard because the Indigenous people in this state have long known that they used fire and still use fire to manage the landscapes, to produce the goods and services, the cultural objects that they need.

I think it is the better guest model that uses that knowledge from the beginning, which helps shape the way I might write about a subject like fire, water, or watersheds. The model’s various reorientations I think have made me a much stronger historian.  I think I’m almost there—at decentering myself from the narrative, not entirely because it is my fingers on the keyboard—but nonetheless that’s the goal.

California fire zones map

BOOM

While decentering perhaps your narrative becomes necessary in your writing and thinking, one thing I’ve found compelling in Natural Consequences was your personal account. You already were talking about public engagement and understanding, but can you speak more about the role of storytelling?

Char Miller

Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think I’ve been very lucky, in part, because editors have kicked my ass for years to sort of open the language. And beginning in the mid-1980s when I started to write for the two major dailies in San Antonio, I would write these essays, these commentaries, and they would come back shredded. And you know, some of that’s just the ease of the newspaper, right? You do the inverted paragraph idea of a pyramid: where you give everything at the front and then get down into the nitty gritty. This was good to learn but and made it clear that it was about the story.

I did not know I did this in high school, but when I went back for a high school reunion they had all the newspapers out and I started reading some of the sports articles I wrote. And I saw that I was telling stories. I was talking about a moment in a game where somebody did something, or my good friends who didn’t do something that I thought they should have done because I’m sitting up in the stands and just sort of kibitzing. So it was the story that I started with and then went from there. I did not know I had that interest when I was a junior in high school, but I know now.

I think some of it is that we are storytellers. That is, I think, an important part of the work that we do. I had some genius storytellers in graduate school, like Willie Lee Rose, a Southern historian. She wrote a book called Rehearsal for Reconstruction, the opening of which put you on a boat for the first union coming up into the Sea Islands in Georgia in early 62′. I mean, you were on the boat. You were listening. You were smelling. You were getting this whole sensibility. I had never read anything like that. And I went, “Oh, I need to study with this person because it just blew my mind.”

The way we can tell stories and history, that’s part of it. It’s an old tradition to be in. It’s an oral culture made written. That’s one of the things I work with my students on: tell me the story. Narrate it in a way that’s a story. I say, “You all tell stories all the time, so give it to me that way and then we can start to work on an essay based off of a personal experience that goes in one direction or another.”

But I do like that process of being in a place, seeing what I think to be are some key issues. I like the process of trying to find a story that helps open that up, whether I’m talking or somebody else is talking about something. Flesh that out so that the story has a human being and a voice the reader can connect with. Then you can do, you know, what we might think of as the heavier work—like theorizing without theorizing. It’s there. It’s just not being said as such. Which I think is important because you’re trying to help people also understand how you are thinking without necessarily putting in footnotes. I love the fact that Natural Consequences doesn’t have a single footnote. I’ve done that a couple of times and any time it’s going get reviewed in a history journal, it’s going get the crap knocked out of it because there are no footnotes. But if you read the text, you know what I’m reading, okay? I’ll slip in various authors of one form or another just to say, “I know what you’re thinking and here it is.”

To go back to your point, this oral tradition of sharing knowledge, we’ve just made it into a written form. I think the works that I really admire the most are those that recognize that duality and play with it in a way that is exciting to read. Part of the excitement is, “Oh, look at how they wrote that sentence. Look at how that sort of carries into the next concept.”

You know, I’ve been very fortunate because I get to work with really sharp kids here and in San Antonio. I would break down some of our readings and say, look at what they’re doing here. Go write that piece. And that’s been fun.

BOOM

You know, when we talk about environmental crisis or climate crisis, there’s generally a fatalism around it. What are things we can do as professionals or regular people to remain positive, and active and find joy in this line of environmental work and in an environmentally conscious lifestyle as well?

Char Miller

I think some of it is woven into the DNA of environmental history. Because that’s partly how it grew, from activist moments and then people going, “Oh wait, what’s the history here?” From there they started doing that kind of work. For me, if you think about ecological and environmental focus on specific places and sites that are different from other places, you’ve just gotten an answer for what in fact we can do as activists. We can and should focus on the places we know and live within because that’s where social change happens. It happens at the grassroots level. So, you don’t need to look very far in greater Los Angeles or across the state to find activist groups that are woven into watersheds, that are part of an effort to create resilient and regenerative ecological niches of one form or another.

And you look at them, you go, “Oh, they’ve taken that creek. They’re thinking about that space because that’s where you can make some of these changes pretty effectively.” And then you can collaborate with the state because it’s got money to do that kind of work. If you think about the city of Pomona as a place that has had enormous environmental injustices, then activists there have already shown us what it’s possible to do. In East LA there are all sorts of groups that are functioning in and around that area for open space and for air pollution controls because they affect that community. The activists are there.

For those whom doomsday is such an easy sell in the classroom, it’s too simple. We’re working with young people. I can’t walk into a classroom and go, “Kids, it’s all over.” It’s easy to do that, but really what you want to do is to say, “Look, here’s where I would locate hope.” Hope lies in the ability to think through the changes that are necessary and then enact them or try to enact them. We’re never going to get there always. Maybe not even often. But it’s not the victory so much that’s crucial, although that would be nice. It’s the effort that’s required.

Here again, environmental justice as a conception and as a practice is critical to this process. At least in the communities that I’ve lived in. That’s a language that appeals to both the academic and the activist on the one hand, but also you can do a lot with a city council or a planning commission and say, “Wait, wait, wait… look at the privileging that this does and the discrimination that it produces. Don’t go there!” Right?

You can intervene in those conversations in part because now we have the language of dispossession and exploitation, or exclusion. We live in a state where those words are not loaded. They are powerful. I mean, they are loaded, but they’re also powerful tools politically. And I think that’s been true across time.

I’m deeply impressed with former students who have gone on in the world and have gone way beyond anything I ever thought of. They are having that kind of impact because they’ve got the theory. It’s wedded in their brains and they’re now applying it in a way that sort of tests that theory against the political realities. It shows that reality a little bit and maybe just enough to start changing the way we live and imagine what’s possible.

“Art and Activism for Climate Action” photo by Fabrice Florin 

BOOM

As an environmental historian and analyst, I’m curious about your interpretation, or experience of COVID.

Char Miller

So, here’s a perfect example of two things. One of which is we did not know what we were doing. The politics of COVID just drove me crazy because we did not know what we were doing. One group was absolutely convinced they knew those who were sort of thinking scientifically said, “Uh, we don’t have the data yet. We got to get the data. Let’s get the data first before we start having these brawls over whether a mask is useful or not.”

At the very moment of this process, we were reminded that illness is not simply illness. It’s different in terms of whose lungs and whose lives it impacts. We saw that in Los Angeles. We’ve seen that everywhere across the globe. If you could insulate and isolate yourself, you would be in a better position. That often broke down along class lines. This economic segregation showed through the resources that one had at one’s disposal. We saw all the inequities that we knew were already there, but now the illness highlighted them in a different way. It was highlighted in a more vivid way.

In many respects, we could say that we’re all suffering COVID. But were we really? From a historian’s point of view, that’s the marker. It isn’t that COVID was universal. It was that COVID was not universally applied. Certain lives were more disrupted, by age, race, by class. These are the kind of distinctions that a historian needs to be sensitive to because that’s when you get the complexity. Complexity is our best friend. So is context and so is contingency. Everything is in some contingent relationship with something else. And as you know, that’s one of the ways in which we sort through a historical moment. It is where we can start to see how people organized their lives. Because in the process of organizing their lives, they may have disorganized someone else’s. I think it is in that interplay that COVID has been, again, for all of us, an extraordinarily important teacher.

BOOM

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Char Miller

I really appreciate you giving me a chance to talk about these things. I would say that that one point I try to convey in talks about this book is that there’s nothing magical about what I’m doing. It is in some cases walking, looking, thinking about what I’m seeing, then going back and scribbling notes to myself, or leaving myself voicemails because I don’t trust my brain to hold anything longer than two minutes if I’m lucky. So, for me as a teacher, but also as a scholar, it’s the kind of work that I had no idea was going to become part of my historian’s practice. I love going into archives. I totally adore them. But then my eyes start straying. It’s like, “Well, what’s out there? There might be something out there I could look at.” I think learning how to look is a real key to learning how to write in a different way. Being able to therefore speak in, I hope, more compelling ways—again, because I’m a storyteller. I love that role. I won’t claim I’m a great one, but I love the role of thinking about looking, seeing, observing, and writing and then writing in a way that’s a form of speech. Because if we can speak in a language that others hear, we’re going to be much more effective at our work and probably much happier in it.

Char Miller is the Director of Environmental Analysis and W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College.

Postcards Series

Legalize Lowriders

on March 6, 2023

By José Vadi

Why repealing bans against cruising matters

Lowriders are motorized time capsules that command respect, or at the very least, a head turn. In Sacramento, the lowrider scene is palpable on sight, with Broadway a favorite strut. We were having a drink on this stretch a few months ago when my wife and I saw a couple of cars with nobody sitting shotgun. Instead, pairs of young, done-up couples cuddled in the back, being chauffeured to their high school proms in style.

“My dad did that for me,” she said, describing the ’64-1/2 Mustang I first heard years ago the night I met my now father-in-law. And though not a lowrider, the Mustang was a specialized car nonetheless—and a memory. 


Maybe it’s a byproduct of growing up in southern California’s eastern sprawl, the San Gabriel Valley—where we tell generational time by new shopping mall ribbon cuttings, freeway expansion dates, and handed down cars—but seeing a lowrider makes me and many others feel welcome. 

Last December, I was driving my mom to her post-op appointment in Downey, south of downtown Los Angeles, from the east-of-east side in Pomona. We started on the freeways before taking the surface streets, my mom navigating us through the paths of her childhood neighborhood—La Puente’s Bassett—along Workman Mills Road, avoiding the bumper to bumper traffic of the 10-605 interchange. We were near Pico Rivera when we saw a street sign saying No Cruising, prohibiting vehicles from moving slowly or returning to the same stretch of road multiple times. 

These signs and subsequent “no cruise zones” were part of a wave of legislation passed throughout California cities through the ‘80s and ‘90s. Though largely unenforced today, these laws are increasingly being written off the books, with Sacramento being the first city to repeal their cruising ban and removing such signage citywide. 

When San Jose quickly followed suit, City Council member Raul Peralez spoke of his experiences driving and facing police harassment. “Over the years, I was stopped dozens of times by the police,” Peralez said, “And nearly every time, I was made to sit on a curb while I and my car were searched. I was questioned about presumed gang involvement.” 

Categorizing cruising as a gang activity or on par with the illegal assemblage of a psychedelic-fueled warehouse rave is ironic now considering how integral lowrider imagery is to the city of Los Angeles’ brand identity. The traffic and pedestrian ribbon cutting of the newly camelbacked 6th Street bridge, connecting East and downtown Los Angeles over the LA River, was led by a local lowrider collective. 

Chauffeuring my mom. I imagined all the kids cruising on Friday nights, in lowriders or not, with big bangs and acid-washed denim, hollering at each other across open windows trying to get someone’s number. But the sign, prohibiting vehicles from moving slowly, reminded me of its target—us. 

Lowriding’s social undertones have been palpable since its wartime infancy into the Chicano movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Roberto Hernandez formed the San Francisco Lowrider Council to combat waves of police brutality, leading not just to legalized cruises, but new parks, services, and the resignation of cops accused by Mission District residents of abuse. Victor Ochoa’s recent mural in San Diego’s Barrio Logan documents the history of the local Brown Image Car Club. Of the vignettes encompassing the pillars of a massive freeway underpass is a scene where some of the crew’s members participated in the occupation of Chicano Park.

On the cusp of the city of Sacramento repealing the ban in June, the Sacramento Lowrider Commission worked with city officials to host a free all-day event in William Land Park. Lines of cars lined the block, some fully tilted with wheels held in the air like a sculpture with an engine behind it. Other older cars had subtle intricate designs, like one car that tells the history of Mexican and Filipino farm worker movement through airbrushed designs. 

This summer, the United Farm Workers marched through the Central Valley—over 300 miles and three weeks from Delano to Sacramento—advocating for Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign AB 2183, the Agricultural Labor Relations Voting Choice Act. The UFW’s website says the act would allow farm workers to “vote free from intimidation…in secret whenever and wherever they feel safe.” Local lowrider chapters have been supporting their efforts throughout the Valley, and Sacramento’s Coalition helped escort marchers from the city’s Southside Park to the state capitol for a massive rally held on August 26th. A vigil was erected and held nonstop on the Capitol steps for days, drawing awareness to Gov. Newsom’s deadline to sign AB 2183 — a move publicly supported by President Biden himself. The pressure worked and Gov. Newsom signed the bill into law with two provisions just before the September 30th deadline. 

The August rally reminded me of that previous event a few months earlier at William Land Park. At one point, all of the women organizers and drivers from the different Sacramento lowrider crews gathered on stage, with many speaking about a lifetime dedicated to taking a cruise. Hearing them, I really understood the affirming power of cruising on your own terms—and the ability to articulate them. We are law abiding, many organizers repeatedly say in fliers and public comment, a community trying to find spaces to do something they consider culturally significant. 

In February 2023, Assemblymember David Alvarez (D-San Diego) introduced AB 436 which “removes the authorization for a local authority to adopt rules and regulations regarding cruising,” essentially creating a statewide repeal of anti-cruising legislation.  

As local lowrider chapters advocate towards related causes affecting the greater Latino community, the evolution and acceptance of lowrider culture cannot be ignored. It’s something unique to the state. To invite others to bear witness, to embrace that feeling — that head turn, jaw slack, mouth opening, fist-to-mouth gasp — when time stops and that four wheel soulful strut passes through. I think that feeling has a word: respect. 

José Vadi is an award-winning essayist, poet, playwright and film producer. He is the author of Inter State: Essays from California.

Articles

Letter From Claremont: Mike Davis is Dying

on March 6, 2023

By: David Goldblatt

Indeed I live in the dark ages!
A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokens
A hard heart. He who laughs
Has not yet heard
The terrible tidings.

Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
And he who walks calmly across the street,
Is he not out of reach of his friends
In trouble?

Bertolt Brecht, On Posterity

September 2022, Claremont, CA

All through the blistering heatwave that has held Southern California in a vice, I’ve been thinking about Mike. Mike Davis is dying. Esophageal cancer that won’t go away.  Last month he opted for palliative care; the end can’t be too far off. The heatwave has another three days to run. Here, in Claremont, it has been around 78 degrees at dawn, climbing to a long hot afternoon plateau as high as 110. I could drive, air-con blazing, to other air-conditioned spaces, but even the short walks across searing hot car parks are unpleasant. Not so much the heat itself, but the deep sense it communicates, that something is very wrong.

I feel it, I think, somewhere deeper than the conscious mind, somewhere buried in the ancient brain stem that stores our trauma and turns it into networks of toxic neurons. So, teaching and food shopping aside, I’m just bunkering down in Professor Davina’s place with its clattering vintage air-con: yoga twice a day, a lot of stillness, just breathing, being in my creaky body… and thinking about Mike.

Mike Davis is one of my guiding stars. I’ve read everything he has ever written, much of it twice. When in 1991, as a grad student in England, I picked up City of Quartz, his polycentric history of Los Angeles, and I couldn’t put it down. I was captivated by its account of the city’s illusions and mythologies, alongside the realities of its racist policing and its fortified architecture. I couldn’t believe sociology or history or theory (it intuitively shape-shifts) could be so smart and sassy, so sharp and stylish, saying it like it is, but wow, saying it like Raymond Chandler. Turns out Mike hates Chandler, for his misogyny, his racism, his small-minded individualism and his amoral fatalistic fascism, but he also can’t stop reading him. I can’t stop reading Mike, and though I’ve never met him, I have at least walked in his footsteps. Back in the 1990s, during one his many periods of financial difficulty and professional limbo, he came and taught at Pitzer college.  And I have done much the same. In over a decade of living in and exploring Los Angeles he has been my constant guide and made this strange but extraordinary metropolis at least comprehensible.

A lot of writers might have just left it there. Whole academic careers have been sustained on slighter contributions than City of Quartz, but Mike was a late starter.  A meat cutter, trucker and trade union activist in his late teens and twenties, he didn’t show up at UCLA for his degree until he was 30.  Impressive as the book was, it was mere prelude, the curtain raiser to two decades of superhuman scholarship and activism. Magical Urbanism surveys the Latino transformation of the American city and its progressive political and aesthetic potential. Planet of Slums, by contrast, was a cadastral survey of the informal settlements that house more than three billion people, in the mega cities of the twenty-first century. Buda’s Wagon was a short and brilliant history of the car bomb and asymmetrical warfare, from Italian-American anarchists to al-Qaeda. Mid Victorian Holocausts is a masterpiece of environmental history, explaining the origins of the global south at the intersection of Victorian imperialism and the El Nino weather events of the era that generated famines, deaths and environmental degradation of such a scale that the gap between North and South became a chasm. In The Monster to Come, a short essay on coronaviruses, avian flu and epidemiology in an era of globalization, published in 2009, he accurately predicted the emergence and course of the COVID pandemic. I could go on…..and on.

His third book, Ecology of Fear sits on my desk. I feel right now like I’m not reading it but living it. So, I’m lucky that Professor Davina’s house, where miraculously I have landed, is a good antidote. Born in the rural Philippines in the 1920’s she arrived in California in her forties and lived here for nearly half a century. For thirty years she was the first Filipina professor of theology in California, teaching at Chaffey Community College. I drink my tea out of a college mug saying “we’re here to help”.  The last couple of decades she was retired and mainly alone; three kids who had moved on and a second husband, Milt, who died fifteen years ago.  Professor Davina died last year, and her daughter Dodi just didn’t have it in her to sort and clear the house: grief, Covid, losing her own partner just three months after her mother, and then breast cancer and surgery. So, the house has sat empty until I arrived, part caretaker, part tenant.

There are still a few reminders of Davina’s last couple of years—walkers gathering dust, mobility aids in her bathroom—but it’s the rest of her long life that is really present.  Dodi told me she had tried to clear some away, but the house is crammed with ecumenical knick- knacks: a seder plate on the wall above the kitchen table, inspirational quotes from a Native American shaman on grubby fridge magnets, statuettes of Confucius and the Buddha, a chopping board from the United Methodists Church, Hindu figurines, Islamic banners. In her office and the living room a lifetime of study, encyclopedias of comparative religion, bibles, Korans, torahs….

One pleasing quirk of the house is the absence of plastic. Dodi said, “She was an environmentalist before her time. She hated plastic.” Look around, the house is full of wood and ceramics, textiles and glass, bamboo, rattan and metal, but literally no plastic. She preferred bone handled knives and wicker basket bins, and all in shades of white and beige and brown and bronze. Clingfilm was allowed, as a cupboard of maybe a dozen huge rolls testifies, but only as an alternative to using Tupperware. Sure, her computer kit and TV are plastic, but I sense they were not much loved. On the shelves in her office there are, carefully organized and catalogued, the products of old analogue technologies—cameras in leather cases, teaching slides in cardboard boxes dozens of photo albums, and half dozen metal rolodexes. On the inside of the food cupboard is an old, typed list, probably from the 1980s, of small environmental actions that we might take—use what you buy, write on both sides of your note paper, choose the lesser of two evils.  Its tone is humble and practical, and although the advice feels hopelessly inadequate, it’s a better voice to listen to than my own sense of creeping doom.

Mike Davis at a volcano in Hawaii. By Alessandra Moctezuma

It helps make the house a good place to hide from the heat through the long afternoons. Conscious of the antiquity of the air conditioning system—and the impossibility of getting it repaired right now—I try and nurse it, keeping the thermostat at 71 degrees, but as the sun passes from the front of the house over the roof and into the back garden it can’t keep up. The internal temperature climbs and climbs and I find myself dozing uneasily on the sofa, unable to move. Yesterday my siesta was broken by a series of noisy, unignorable urgent sounds from my British and American cell phones. It’s a text from California’s energy agencies letting us now that the level of demand for electricity is reaching break point. If, for the next few hours, we don’t all turn off everything short of the AC then we are looking at rolling outages and blackouts. I turn out the lights, leave my washing and cooking to later, light a few of the professor’s devotional candles and get back to Mike and Ecology of Fear.

The book’s basic premise is that to build a metropolis of near fifteen million people in a desert is not sustainable. Make it exclusively dependent on the private motor car, and you are really in trouble.  Add the fire hazards on the wooded slopes of Los Angeles’ hills and mountains, and the insatiable demand for water that simply isn’t there and disaster looms.  Now factor in another two decades of climate change since the book was written and the city, right now, is close to unlivable and only so at the price of more massive carbon emissions.

Then there is the San Andreas fault, the geological atom bomb that runs through the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area. Tremors are a dime a dozen here, though as I know from my own quivering disbelief on experiencing one, no less unnerving for that. The last time the fault really bared its teeth was the Northridge Earthquake in 1994. It is, by historic standards, due to do so again, sometime soon. Professor Davina had been making preparations. In the garage, beneath a dusty bunch of yellow plastic roses, I find the remnants of a basic earthquake stash—eight big plastic bottles of water, torches, batteries, first aid kit. I’m not sure any of it will be much use when the big one comes and make a mental note to assemble my own.

I sit inside nearly all day.  After about 1:00 pm the sun has passed over the front of the house, and outside the front door there is a small pool of hot shade. The small park opposite is entirely empty. For a couple of hours after dawn there is a smattering of dog walkers and determined joggers, but then there is no one until dusk. Huge SUVs, sparkling white and black and silver, occasionally glide past. I listen to the rumble of the 210 freeway, just a hundred meters north of us, the hum of my neighbor’s air conditioner, watch the vapor trails of planes heading to and from LAX.

Only as the sun is going down do I make my way to the back garden. It’s still fearsomely hot, but at least I can look at the smog rainbow sunset and the San Gabriel Mountains. In past summers there still would have been a sprinkling of snow on the high peaks, but they are brown and bare. The smog is still with us. I can see that once the garden was a beautiful space with pomegranate, cherry and apricot trees and dozens of fabulous huge succulents. Since Professor Davina died the drip hoses and sprinklers have broken and there has been no watering at all. Southern California is in the midst of an unprecedented three-year long drought, so there hasn’t been much help from the weather. Now the apricot and cherry trees are dead, their few remaining leaves are crisped to a dark brown. The succulents, still just hanging on, have shrunk, and shriveled and shed what leaves they have held onto to survive. But they are a sorry sight—desiccated mutant versions of themselves. The pomegranate has, amazingly, hung on, and is even bearing fruit. I can’t bear to pick them. It seems, after such herculean botanical efforts, too cruel to take it. Dodi has arranged for landscapers to take out the dead, put in new drips and drought resistant plants, maybe save the pomegranate and the succulents. I tend and water my little collection of newly potted tomatoes and basil. They are surviving.

It doesn’t take much to join the dots here. But as the news from home, where the government is arresting people demanding that the country’s aging housing be fitted with better insulation suggests, the economic and political elites of this world are willfully refusing to do so. I’m reading Mike again, in what will probably be his last interview, and, as ever, he condenses my thoughts, and finds words to pierce my heart.

“Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan.”

Pomona , Cal.; Claremont and Old Baldy. By Brück & Sohn Kunstverlag Meißen

So, what to do? On one of the many occasional tables scattered around Professor Davina’s house, alongside a carved wooden cockerel from the Philippines and a dusty menorah, lies a small, cardboard oval. It is threaded with old string for hanging on a wall, but it has been left on the table. I didn’t notice it for the first week I was here. Then, for no reason at all, I stopped and looked at it. In thick embossed silver script it says “hope”. Its kitsch and its corny, but right now I’ll take corny.

Last week in a press conference PSG star Kilian Mbappe and coach Christophe Galtier were asked why the team took a private jet from Paris to Nantes, just a few hundred kilometers away and accessible by TGV. They both laughed. Galtier quipped, “This morning we talked about it with the company which organizes our trips and we’re looking into traveling on sand yachts.” I showed it my students. It was electric. For the next forty minutes we explored how sports is connected to the climate crisis and what it might do about it. The power and responsibilities of athletic celebrity, the inequality of carbon emissions and climate impacts, football in Africa in a heating world, how climate change affected their own play (lots them are on the college soccer team), and a dozen other things. They were a mix of amazed, curious, angry—and ignited. For all the detail what was really going on was the sound of hundreds of pennies dropping; the slot machine of education hitting the jackpot.

Afterwards, thinking about Mbappe laughing and his smooth ephebic forehead, I made the connection back to Brecht. Of course, it was Mike, whose breadth of reading has never ceased to amaze and please me, that got me back to On Posterity. In the time left to him he says he’s doing a lot of family time, watching Scandinavian noir and reading Brecht. He said:

“I’ve always been influenced by the poems Brecht wrote in the late 30s, during the Second World War, after everything had been incinerated, all the dreams and values of an entire generation destroyed, and Brecht said, ‘Well, it’s a new dark ages….how do people resist in the dark ages?'”

Brecht, in the end offers pretty thin gruel. He knows it and asks us, “Do not judge us too harshly.” I need more than that. Mike Davis, for me, just nails it, “Despair is useless.”

What keeps us going, ultimately, is our love for each other, and our refusal to bow our heads, to accept the verdict, however all-powerful it seems. It’s what ordinary people have to do. You have to love each other. You have to defend each other.  You have to fight.

So, I’m writing this and sending it to you because I love you (and Mike Davis, and Professor Davina, and my Pitzer college students), and I’m trying not to bow my head, and to find my way to be a part of our mutual defiance, for what I’m worth. If you want to fight, I’m all ears, but love is also allowed, and if you want to go read some Mike Davis, then that’s good too.

Coda

Mike Davis left us in late October.  The heatwave gave way to a long hot autumn, and then the cataclysmic storm and rains of late December 2022 and early January 2023.  Professor Davina’s house held up and Dodi and I have made a start on sifting and sorting it.

David Goldblatt is a sports writer, broadcaster, sociologist, journalist, author, and visiting professor of sociology at Pitzer College.

Excerpts

Natural Consequences: Intimate Essays for a Planet in Peril

on February 27, 2023

By: Char Miller

This Land is Their Land 

However polite its title, the 1891 “Petition to the Senators and Representatives of the Congress of the United States in the Behalf of the Remnants of the former Tribes of the Yosemite Indians Praying for Aid and Assistance” was anything but deferential. 

The petition offered a blunt critique of the mostly white gold miners’ brutal incursion into the Yosemite region in the late 1840s. It sharply criticized the state-sanctioned violence that California unleashed in the 1850s on the Indigenous Peoples of the Central Sierra, and astutely recognized that elite tourists—and the amenities they required to cushion their late nineteenth-century visits to the rugged landscape—were also responsible for cultural disruption and physical dispossession. The petition reported that the previous half century of exploitation had turned the Ahwahneechii and Monos into “poorly-clad paupers and unwelcome guests, silently the objects of curiosity or contemptuous pity to the throngs of strangers who yearly gather in this our own land and heritage.”  

The once fertile and sustaining terrain of the Indigenous Peoples had been torn apart. “The gradual destruction of its trees, the occupancy of every foot of its territory by bands of grazing horses and cattle, the decimation of the fish in the river, the destruction of every means of support for ourselves and families by the rapacious acts of the whites,” the petition asserted, would “shortly result in the total exclusion of the remaining remnants of our tribes from this our beloved valley, which has been ours from time beyond our faintest traditions, and which we still claim.” 

The US government did not respond to this appeal for the return of tribal lands, an ironclad treaty that would protect their inheritance, and compensation for their decades of immiseration. Instead, the petition, to which forty-three survivors put their names, was buried in the 1891 report of Yosemite’s acting park superintendent. But its bureaucratic fate doesn’t diminish its importance any more than does the probability that the document’s amanuensis was a Euro-American fluent in English. The oral histories on which the petition depends, and, as anthropologist Ed Castillo observed, the “incredible description” it provides of the “political, military, and ecological factors driving remaining tribesmen from their valley could only have as their source local Indigenous knowledge.”  

That knowledge, and the distressing catalogue of injustices it contains, is an important challenge to settler-colonial justifications for How the West Was Won. One facet of that master narrative also centers on Yosemite National Park— by the time tourists arrived to “ooh and ahhh” over its iconic waterfalls, steep granite walls, and staggering vistas, the land was “empty.” Its putative emptiness, the result of violent dispossession, set the stage for an early twentieth-century, decade-long battle over whether to build a dam in the park’s Hetch Hetchy Valley. The dam’s proponents, including federal officials, as well as citizens and politicians in San Francisco eager to secure a stable water supply following the 1906 earthquake that devastated the city, believed the dam was emblematic of Progressive Era reforms that provided essential—and publicly owned—resources to a rapidly urbanizing society. John Muir, founding president of the Sierra Club, which was established in 1892, was among those who pushed back, arguing that the dam’s construction would inundate the wild Hetch Hetchy Valley. “Dam Hetch Hetchy!” he thundered, “as well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated for the heart of man.” 

What neither side admitted was that their respective arguments depended on a shared perception that no one lived in the Hetch Hetchy Valley., or that no had ever lived there. Its emptiness enabled dam supporters to conclude that the site would be perfect for a reservoir. Its emptiness, for those like Muir who pressed for the valley’s preservation, was a mark of its higher utility as pristine nature. Yet to conceive of this valley as devoid of people required two forms of erasure of the history and contemporary status of the Indigenous Peoples that their 1891 petition so brilliantly evoked.  

The first erasure occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, when California and the United States governments sanctioned the violent expulsion of the Indigenous Peoples from the Sierras’s flanking valleys and foothills. The dispossession of the Miwok, Paiute, Shoshone, and others from their ancestral territories was an act of genocide, historian Benjamin Madley argues in American Genocide. He writes: the “pressures of demographics (the migration of hundreds of thousands of immigrants), economics (the largest gold rush in US history), and profound racial hatred all made the genocide possible, it took sustained political will—at both the federal and state levels—to create the laws, policies, and well-funded killing machine that carried it out and ensured its continuation over decades.” 

The second erasure is embedded in the continuing and disquieting silence over the interlocking connection between the ruthless uprooting of Indigenous Peoples from the Yosemite region, the establishment of the national park, and the subsequent Hetch Hetchy controversy. Until that silence is broken, our understanding of the ongoing debate about the dam and reservoir will remain incomplete. This accounting is especially necessary because scholars and activists assert that the formative battle over the Hetch Hetchy dam marked the birth of the modern environmental movement in the United States. The assertion reveals a troubling and complicated story. 

Muir was integral to each of these erasures. Consider his reflections that he jotted down in his journal after a hike up what he called Bloody Canyon in Mono County and then revised for publication in his book The Mountains of California 1894). Entering the pass, the “huge rocks began to close around in all their wild, mysterious impressiveness,” Muir wrote, “when suddenly, as I gazed eagerly about me, a drove of gray, hairy beings came into sight., lumbering toward with a kind of boneless, wallowing motion like bears.” Anxious about “so grim a company,” and suppressing his fears, he realized “that although hairy as bears and as crooked as summit pines, the strange creatures were sufficiently erect to belong to our own species.” He was hiking up a trail that the Mono and other Indigenous Peoples had worn smooth over the millennia, transiting between the Mono and Owens basins and Yosemite and the valleys below. His disdain for these men and women shows throughout his descriptions, such as, “the dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and seemed so ancient and so undisturbed it might almost possess a geological significance.” To Muir they belonged to a distant time, and befouled his wilderness. “Somehow they seemed to have no right place in the landscape, and I was glad to see them fading out of sight down the pass.” 

The larger settler-colonial culture adopted his perspective and, whether Indigenous Peoples were forced out of Yosemite by force of arms or the scratch of a pen, a key consequence was that this “empty” terrain was ripe for commercial exploitation. Tourism to the region, enabled by a growing cross-continental transportation grid, and the growth of San Francisco and Los Angeles, was fueled by artists and photographers who visited the region a decade or more before Muir’s arrival there in 1868. James Mason Hutchings, who hired Muir to work at his Yosemite hotel, was a relentless promoter. He drew a swelling number of artists, scientists, and tourists to make the arduous journey to the remote location through his publication of tour guides, lithographs, and magazine articles about Yosemite’s wonders and curiosities. Many of these visitors recounted their experiences in the rough and wild space, some published, others not. However manifest, these documents reinforced the cultural conversation about what they perceived to be Yosemite’s prime value—a beneficent refuge in an industrializing world, where you could escape civilization, and yet have its amenities. 

The sanctuary status was one of the key arguments that Muir and others developed in the early twentieth century against the city of San Francisco and its political allies who laid claim to the Hetch Hetchy Valley inside what became Yosemite National Park. The thrust and counterthrust manifested in a series of congressional hearings, in the pages of many of the nation’s leading magazines and newspapers, and in oft angry speeches. The fierce debate testifies to the centrality of a valley that few Americans had ever visited. Even though San Francisco’s interests prevailed, and the O’Shaughnessy Dam and its steep-walled reservoir  that funnels potable water to the Bay Area was built, the controversy continues to simmer. Beginning in the 1980s, an odd coalition of Republican state and national politicians and the Sierra Club and its allies periodically call into question San Francisco’s reliance on the reservoir and urge the federal government to tear down the dam and restore the long-submerged valley. 

Yet any resolution of this enduring latest struggle to define the future of Hetch Hetchy, and by extension Yosemite, must start by prioritizing what hitherto has been ignored. Novelist, historian, and activist David Treuer writes, “America’s national parks comprise only a small fraction of the land stolen from Native Americans, but they loom large in the broader story of our dispossession.” His pithy conclusion—”the American West began with war but concluded with parks”—is mirrored in the Yosemite Indigenous Peoples’ claims asserted in the 1891 petition: “We say this valley was not given to us by our fathers for a day, or a year, but for all time.” 

Char Miller is the W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College and the director of the Claremont Colleges‘ environmental analysis program.

Copyright © 2022 by Char Miller
Publisher Reverberations Books Santa Cruz, CA
www.reverberationsbooks.com
Imprint of Chin Music Press Seattle, WA
www.chinmusicpress.com
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935659
ISBN: 978-1-63405-037-1

Articles

“The Correct Way of Writing the Indian Language”: Juan Dolores at the University of California

on February 27, 2023

Andrew Garrett

Adapted from The Unnaming of Kroeber Hall: Language, Memory, and Indigenous California, by Andrew Garrett, published by The MIT Press (to appear in 2023).

It rained for ten days in late February and early March 1911. “Enough Water to Last All Summer” was the Sacramento Bee headline.[1] Juan Dolores was stuck inside, unable to do the work that had brought him to the state capital. Instead, he spent 14 hours a day writing out a story in O’odham, the Indigenous language of his childhood, family, and people in southern Arizona and northern Sonora, Mexico. Writing all 2,873 words took him seven days; a precise English translation took two more. He finished at 11 pm, went to bed, and dreamed about translating O’odham.

Dolores described his dream in a letter: “I saw words appearing on the wall, like [a] moving picture show. First a word would go clear across the wall and then automatically arrange itself into two or three words. Sometimes there would be only one letter and under it, would be two or three English words. When I awoke, I said this is no dream. It is the correct way of writing the Indian language.” He emphasized the semantic complexity of O’odham: “I have to write t[w]o or three English words for one Indian word.”[2]

The story Juan Dolores finished writing in March 1911 was one of dozens that he wrote and rewrote in a lifetime devoted to documenting the O’odham language.[3] When he died in 1948, he left thousands of manuscript pages and over 60 sound recordings of his own voice and the voices of elders he recorded. Dolores was “the first writer of his people’s legends,” to quote a later romanticized formulation, and he did write many creation stories (“legends”).[4] He also transcribed oratory, vocabulary, the autobiographies of elders, the words of songs and what they signify, and a memoir of his Arizona childhood in the 1880s and 1890s. For four decades from 1909 to 1948, he did most of this language work as a University of California researcher and museum employee.

The University of California does not memorialize such details, but Dolores may have been its first Indigenous employee. He was almost certainly its first Indigenous researcher. Yet though he is well known to O’odham people in Arizona, in Berkeley he is almost forgotten. His career and life reveal the challenges facing an Indigenous scholar and writer within the academy in the first half of the twentieth century, as well as his profound achievements in the face of such challenges.

Dolores was born about 1880 on the Mexican side of the border dividing a transnational O’odham community. His parents moved the family to the US, where Dolores enrolled in government schools in Arizona and Colorado.[5] In 1898, he entered the Hampton Institute, a primarily Black college in Virginia, graduating in 1901 and continuing for a year in a postgraduate course. In his last student years, Dolores showed his aptitude as a writer, publishing a short creation story (a “legend”) in The Indian Advance and a valedictory perspective, “As an Indian Sees It,” in the Hampton Institute’s monthly magazine.[6]

Juan Dolores considering a croquet shot in a “championship game,” St. Helena, 1932. A. L. Kroeber Family Photographs, BANC PIC 1978.12, ALB v. 4, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

In 1901, Dolores spoke at the Nineteenth Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, a meeting of white philanthropists who thought they knew what was best for Indigenous people. His speech recounted the words of an O’odham elder who had asked: “What is that thought so great and so sacred that cannot be expressed in our own language, that we should seek to use the white man’s words?”[7] Credited to an elder rather than in his own persona, this was a polite rebuke of his hosts, who favored the assimilation of Indigenous people into Euro-American culture and the elimination of tribal authority. It was also a repudiation of language practices that brutalized children throughout the US, at schools whose students were taught Euro-American ways and severely disciplined if they spoke their languages.

Dolores had been one of those students. He did not know English when he first entered the Tucson Indian School. If students were overheard speaking an Indigenous language, he later wrote in his O’odham-language memoir, the teachers “would punish us with the mule whip, or would give us extra work, or would lock us up in the dark house.” But he channeled his linguistic commitment into subversive play. If a teacher happened to say an English word that sounded like O’odham, Dolores would whisper that to the other students. Ita tcitcivitak hepay ha’itcu sta’a’askima o’otamkatc, he wrote: “this was very funny in O’odham.” Sometimes one of the others “could not control herself and she would just burst out laughing. I was delighted. I was constantly listening for words that would sound funny in O’odham.”[8]

Dolores headed back west after his school years. Seasonal work as a teamster and skilled laborer took him to Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, and California. It was in San Francisco that he met the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1909. The two men — one in his early thirties, the other a few years younger — had very different backgrounds but converging goals.

Kroeber, born in 1876 to a middle-class German-American family in New York, had come to the University of California in 1901 after finishing a Columbia University anthropology PhD. His central research mission was recording Indigenous languages and stories. Many aspects of culture interested him, but he had shifted to anthropology from literature and once said that his “actual work will always be literature.”[9] His main legacy a century later is the documentation of languages, speech, stories, and songs that Indigenous people in California and elsewhere shared in their work with him, his students, and his colleagues.

Like most contemporary Euro-Americans, Kroeber believed mistakenly that Native American cultures and languages were “dying” or even “extinct.” Recording them whenever possible was seen as urgent by some anthropologists and many Indigenous people themselves. Their purposes were not the same. Researchers like Kroeber thought Native languages and stories could make world culture more ecumenical and culturally tolerant, while Indigenous people understood that they were making records for their own communities.

Indigenous cultures did not die out, of course. Some languages remain vital, too, despite policies of language oppression in government schools. Others are in peril, with just a few elders who grew up with language in the home; or dormant, without speakers but with people who want to learn. Throughout California in 2023, as communities reclaim their languages and stories from archives, what prescient ancestors shared and wrote down a hundred years ago is given new life every day.

Kroeber knew that Indigenous people themselves, with the proper tools, could transcribe their own languages better than outsiders like himself. So part of his work included teaching Indigenous people how to write their languages — in Dolores’s case, the O’odham language he had been whipped for speaking in school. Together, Dolores and Kroeber worked out a quasi-phonetic spelling system for O’odham. With this, Dolores began what would be his life’s work.

Dolores’s employment was itinerant for many years.[10] The University of California hired him for O’odham language work with Kroeber in 1909 and 1911-13. According to UC records, he was first a regular “employee” (rather than a consultant or contractor) in April 1912. Until 1916 he worked for the UC anthropology museum in San Francisco, where his duties included public lectures on O’odham culture.[11] In 1918-19, he held a UC research fellowship to engage in linguistic fieldwork, recording O’odham elders in Arizona.

In 1926, Dolores returned permanently to university work. He had worked outside academia since 1919, but he had health problems as well as a strong desire to resume O’odham linguistic research. Toward the end of 1925, he was hospitalized in Los Angeles with chest pain and an infected foot. He used a cane after he left the hospital. “My speed is about that of a snail,” Dolores wrote with his usual dark humor. “A continuous strain through these five months has now deprived me of my good looks and all that is left of me is courage.”[12] Bruce Bryan, an archaeologist at the Los Angeles Natural History Museum, told Dolores in February that he might be able to hire him in a month or so. Meanwhile, Dolores reported, “the pain inside of me got worse” and he used crutches for a while. He told Kroeber that he wanted to continue “that work I started with you some years ago” and that an O’odham dictionary “will give me something to do for a long time.” Otherwise, he lamented, “I shall have to sell shoestrings and chewing-gum for my living.”[13]

So it was that Dolores resumed full-time UC museum work for ten years beginning in 1926; in 1931, the anthropology museum moved from San Francisco to Berkeley. In 1936 and 1937, Dolores managed a government-funded research project at the University of Chicago, focusing on the lives of Mexican immigrants. He returned again to Berkeley and his museum job late in 1937, eventually retiring as a “senior preparator” a few weeks before his death in 1948.

The presence of an Indigenous scholar in conventionally white spaces fascinated newspapers and presumbly their readers. In 1911, the Dolores-Kroeber collaboration occasioned a San Francisco Examiner article steeped in dehumanizing language ideologies.[14] “Gestures are a part of [Dolores’s] speech,” the writer opined. “If he broke his arm he could not talk.” The O’odham language was said to express “common English thoughts” with comically long words. Only a month later, ironically, Dolores would recount his dream showing that two or three English words may correspond to one short O’odham word — precisely inverting the Examiner trope.

In 1927, a reporter found it newsworthy that an Indigenous person worked in a university museum.[15] Why, Dolores was asked, had he chosen the job? His answer demonstrates how effectively US acculturation policies had trapped many Indigenous people:

Indian life and customs as I knew them when a boy are more faithfully represented here in showcases than they are on the reservation. Nothing would suit me better than to live as my fathers lived, hunting and fishing and gathering fruit and berries. There is plenty of time for one to think then. But if I were to try to live that way now, I would be arrested for trespass or something.

American practices had removed Indigenous cultural heritage to museums, and kept Native people from living on their own land. Even those who had adopted new ways were subject to Euro-American whims:

I might possibly go back to Arizona and work on a piece of land I have fenced in there — my grandfather was one of the first men in our tribe to raise cattle under his own brand — but I have seen so many of my friends work for years on land and then be evicted by some court order or entanglement in titles, that I wouldn’t dare improve my piece for fear some white man would decide it was worth having.

These comments were quite candid for a medium that often celebrated white benevolence.

Even in 1935, it was national news when Dolores married Sylva Beyer, a UC anthropology graduate student. It made the front page in Oakland (“U.C. Co-ed and Indian Marry”) and Tucson (“Indian and White Woman Marry”).[16] The story ran in Minnesota, and the Oakland Tribune even published a follow-up.[17] Kroeber was the witness at a civil ceremony that was of broader interest only because it challenged assumptions about who belonged in elite spaces.

Dolores published four academic papers on his language. Two presented information about nouns and verbs, respectively; in another, for a volume in honor of Kroeber, he wrote about nicknames.[18] A fourth paper, co-authored with University of California anthropologist Lila O’Neale, was a novel study of O’odham color terminology, showing how it is embedded in its cultural and environmental contexts. As a person’s hair turns white, they wrote, there is a stage when “the head looks … like ground [saguaro] cactus seeds … The kernel is white, but the bits of crushed black shell in the mixture give the whole an appearance of gray, or skaima’ki” (in Dolores’s O’odham spelling).[19] This was two decades before cross-cultural differences in color naming became a prominent object of anthropological and linguistic study.

Dolores also tried to publish the O’odham stories he assembled over many years. Kroeber said his “new way of writing stories” in English might attract general interest, different as it was from the style of academics and “literary people” alike. “I will try to get them placed for you as a book under your own name,” he told Dolores in 1927.[20] He sent some to New York publishers, but nothing came of the attempt.

By 1947, Dolores had prepared a large set of O’odham stories and translations to submit as a scholarly monograph. He was concerned to include all his stories and “not let the little ones get left behind.”[21] He sent the manuscript to the series editor, Charles Voegelin of Indiana University, and continued to work on issues related to spelling. It was not until the month of Dolores’s death in 1948 that Voegelin finally decided not to publish the volume; apparently it was not academically rigorous enough for him.[22] Dolores had returned to Arizona and never found out.

Dolores also did not live to see the publication of an O’odham grammar based on his work. This was written by the linguist J. Alden Mason and published under Mason’s name. While acknowledged in the introduction, Dolores was not named as a co-author even though the book was almost entirely based on Dolores’s own collection of stories, shared with Mason in 1919. It was Dolores, too, who introduced Mason to O’odham people during the linguist’s only Arizona fieldwork, a trip of “a few weeks … to get some impression of the phonetics.”[23] It was common at the time for the intellectual labor of Indigenous collaborators to be deprecated as service or mere data production.

Mason never learned to speak or understand O’odham; he analyzed it through Dolores’s writing alone, as one might study Latin. Dolores had little respect for the man who was writing what they both assumed would be a major reference. “How does anybody know how to write a word unless he knows how that word is pronounced?” he asked in 1919.[24] Kroeber promised “to try to see to it that you get a crack at everything he does before publication.”[25]

Dolores also disagreed with Mason’s linguistic choices. The 1911 dream that showed Dolores “the correct way of writing” O’odham expressed a sense that its sentences had many small words. These include grammatical particles and pronouns that Mason chose to treat as parts of complex words. Partial English parallels are I’ll and wouldn’t’ve. Mason might have called each a single word; Dolores might have said they are two (I + ’ll) or three (would + n’t + ’ve). “Dr. Mason takes a whole phrase and calls it a word,” Dolores complained in 1920, “because he can’t understand why any part of an unpronounceable collection of syllables should have any special meaning.”

Juan Dolores, “The Wind and the Rain,” 1911 (selection). Ethnological Documents of the Department and Museum of Anthropology, 1875-1958. BANC FILM 2216, 134.1.5, p. 1, Banroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Most of all, Dolores was upset by Mason’s long delay in finishing the grammar. It was not a high priority to Mason amid other professional obligations, but to Dolores it was absolutely essential to see it completed. His letters to Kroeber reiterate his impatience as he waited for the indirect fruit of his own intellectual labor. Whatever Mason has done, he wrote in 1921, “I am sure is good enough to all who don’t know the [O’odham] language … I wish him good luck but more speed, so I can see the work finished before I depart to some other sphere.”[26]

A year later, he echoed this sentiment with characteristic irony: “My health is good, but my teeth are getting bad, and I suppose when I can’t eat, I can’t live. I must be nearing the time when I shall have to take a trip to some other planet, so hurry up Dr Mason, I want to see his work before I go.”[27] Tragically, it was not until 1950, two years after Dolores died, that the grammar based on his work saw the light of day. He never held it in his hands.

The whimsy in Dolores’s language dream and imagined interplanetary voyage was an enduring feature of his writing. In a May 1911 letter from Sacramento, he speculated about a Berkeley linguist formulating grammatical “rules” for O’odham:

Whoever makes the rules for the [O’odham] language, he or she must take into consideration the great difference in the climate of southern Ariz. and Berkeley. You see, I was thinking that many things which grow in Berkeley could not grow in southern Ariz. The climate I think could make anything grow in Berkeley, I believe, I grew some the time I was there. The hot weather has taken me back to about 150 lbs now. For this reason I am compelled to think very seriously, whether the rules now growing on the college grounds (there among the beautiful grass, trees, and flowers, and the nice sea breeze blowing over them every day) could not be too tender, and when exposed to that hot and dry climate of Ariz., get sun burned, change its color, [d]ry up, lose its flexibility, it[s] elasticity and break.[28]

Dolores’s fanciful comments about environment and grammar anticipated his disapproval of Mason’s knowledge of O’odham from writing alone, as well as his collaoration with O’Neale on the ecological context of O’odham color terms. To understand the language, it would be best to learn to speak it in the place it truly lived.

Later that year, Ishi walked into Oroville, California. Publicity surrounded a man who was luridly called a “wild Indian.”[29] Kroeber and his colleague T. T. Waterman both said the US should grant him land in his ancestral territory; newspapers predicted a treaty.[30] Dolores saw this and said he should hide in the mountains so white people could “find” him too. Then, he wrote, “tell [President] Taft or somebody, that they have to make a treaty with me. I think that will be the only way I can get some good place to stay the rest of my life.”[31] Whimsy could not mask the need so many Indigenous people had for their land back.

Wherever he found himself, Dolores was linguistically aware. In 1914, he and his brother were working in Los Angeles together with two young O’odham men. “We have a tent by ourselves,” he told Kroeber, “and in the evenings we tell to one another the funny things our people used to do, and what they used to say.” One of the young men spoke the Akimel O’odham dialect, called “Pima” at the time. “When the Pima boy speaks,” Dolores wrote, “I nearly always laugh at him; not because he always tells a funny story, but I laugh at the way he expresses himself. I have not heard the Pima language for a long time, and it sounds funny to me.”[32] The pleasure that Dolores’s language gave him is a recurring theme in his writing.

Dolores returned to his own land with university support during his research fellowship year, 1918-19, recording the speech (and songs) of O’odham elders. Even then, his correspondence highlights the clash between his employers’ assumptions and Indigenous realities. To reimburse a researcher for expenses incurred, university procedures (then and now) require receipts. The acting museum head asked, “Will it not be possible for you to obtain the receipt for the $3.00 you paid for the two stories, and for the $1.50 for the saddle?”[33] In a letter from November 1918, Dolores explained how inappropriate this would be:

The people who came through San Xavier are some relations to me, and they let me have the saddle horse to Tucson. They charged me nothing, but I gave them the $1.50. I thought that this was right; I might need their help again out in the desert. … I did not ask anybody to sign a voucher, because by that act the thing freely given becomes a different thing altogether. The $1.50 which I gave is not the value of the service to me. It only shows to my friends that I am as willing to give any help that I can. I might go on and make a longer explanation which I think will not do me any good; so charge the $1.50 to me.[34]

People who insist on signatures may be “looked upon now,” he added, “as we look upon a German spy.” More generally, a Euro-American assumption (then and, all too often, now) was that research in Native communities is transactional — money for knowledge. Dolores knew better. Indigenous community-based research is relational, and succeeds only in the context of healthy, mutually supportive relationships.

Writing to Kroeber in 1920, Dolores spun out a fantasy of O’odham language collaboration under the stars:

Some day when we are all well, I’ll build a house and then I’ll send you that invitation. I am in no hurry about building that house, and if you want to come out next summer I’ll find somebody to board us, and we’ll sleep in the open, look at the stars, and talk [O’odham] until your tongue gets tired flying up and down trying to make that t [sound] … In day times, when you are not working on the [O’odham] language, it will be a good exercise to go out and help me chop trees, dig stumps, or if it rains we’ll plant corn, beans and do all kinds of stunts you never done before. While doing the above named exercises, we will at the same time puzzle out the meanings of [O’odham] phrases.[35]

The first sentence alludes to long-term health problems. These included tooth pain; and Dolores’s 1925 hospitalization was mentioned above. In 1940, a workplace fall damaged a shoulder and caused permanent loss of vision in one eye. Worse still, in November 1947, the elderly Dolores was beaten up, robbed, and left unconscious outside his Oakland apartment. Doctors suspected traumatic brain injury, though Dolores “seemed cheerful.”[36] From this assault he never fully recovered.

After Kroeber married Theodora Kracaw Brown in 1926, Dolores grew close to their whole family. He had a weekly dinner invitation at their Berkeley home and spent his vacation every year with them at their summer house. Their daughter, the writer Ursula K. Le Guin, recalled that “Juan — a killer croquet player — always got there in time for his birthday” at the end of June.[37] Dolores gave Christmas presents to the children, like a bow and arrows to four-year-old Karl in 1930. “I hope he’ll not be trying to shoot his play mates,” Dolores wrote. “The arrows have no points but I imagine Carl will not be hunting mountain lions and the arrows will be good enough to play with.”[38]

Juan Dolores, 1911. Photo by J. Alden Mason, A. L. Kroeber Family Photographs, BANC PIC 1978.12, Box 1, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

Le Guin also remembered Dolores’s first vacation with her family, in 1931, “the summer I learned to walk.” She would “stagger” over to him and ask him to walk with her:

And whatever he was doing, writing or reading or talking or working, Juan would excuse himself and gravely accompany me across the yard and up the driveway on a great journey of a hundred yards or so, I holding on to him by one finger. . . . I know which finger it was, the first of his left hand, a strong, thick, dark finger that entirely and warmly filled my hand.

Those who knew Dolores well were aware of how important his relationship with Kroeber was. At the end of Dolores’s short marriage to Silva Beyer, who lived with him in Chicago in 1935-37, she told Kroeber that “you . . . are far more significant to him than I had become.”[39] And Dolores’s niece Rosaria Vavages wrote Kroeber in April 1947 that her uncle “has told me a lot about you and your family [and] how he feels that your family is his family too.”[40]

Juan Dolores died on July 19, 1948, in Vamori, Arizona in the Tohono O’odham Nation. He had left Berkeley for the last time when he retired at the end of June. He reached Tucson “a very sick man,” his niece said. He hardly ate, but every day he “dragged himself to the park,” which was cooler than the house and his room (“just like an oven”). [41] He would not let her call a doctor, insisting instead that he be taken to Vamori, where he could be buried near his brother and sister. Dolores had lived almost all his life away from O’odham land, but wanted to be home with his family. He asked his niece to tell his Berkeley colleagues that she should receive his pension, and to send Kroeber all the manuscripts he had brought with him in retirement.

Dolores’s O’odham manuscripts record language, stories, and songs. He added many details about language and the contexts and meaning of what he recorded. One 60-page story is followed by six pages of notes like this: “The race track is that open space, under the mountain, on the west side. There are no trees on this land, and [it] is level. The distance is about 50 mi[les] or more.”[42] A song transcript comments that a word meaning “Come along” is used “only in baby language.” In the song, the earth doctor is “speaking to the earth as if it is his child, holding it by the hand [as] he pull[s] it along, saying Come along.”[43] Dolores’s writing includes histories and speeches, biography and geography. As a whole, it comprises an O’odham cultural atlas from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Dolores’s manuscripts have been scattered over the decades and are now housed in archives in Berkeley, Tucson, and Philadelphia.[44] His memoir has appeared under his name; many of his stories are in a volume assembled by others who acknowledged his contributions but did not credit him as an author.[45] While some of his writing has been brought home, much awaits the reclamation he surely desired. Almost five decades passed from his student essays to his last work, but Juan Dolores, the “gentle, intellectual man, living in exile and poverty” that Le Guin saw in memory, never lost sight of how land and language would strengthen his people.

SOURCES

[1] “Enough Water to Last All Summer,” Sacramento Bee, March 2, 1911: 3.

[2] Dolores to Alfred Kroeber, March 16, 1911, Records of the Department of Anthropology, CU-23, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 11.

[3] Like others at the time, Dolores always called his language “Papago” in English. This term is now often seen as a slur, so I have replaced it throughout with “O’odham.”

[4] For the quotation see Dean Saxton and Lucille Saxton, O’othham Hoho’ok A’agitha: Legends and Lore of the Papago and Pima Indians (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1973), iii.

[5] Before the Hampton Institute, Dolores spent four years at the Teller Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado: Dolores to Kroeber, December 22, 1925, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49. For brief accounts of Dolores’s life, see A. L. Kroeber, “Juan Dolores, 1880-1948,” American Anthropologist 51 (1949): 96-97, and Juan Dolores and Madeleine Mathiot, “The Reminiscences of Juan Dolores, an Early O’odham linguist,” Anthropological Linguistics 33 (1991): 233-35.

[6] J. M. Lolorias, “The Last Great War,” The Indian Advance 2/8 (April 1, 1901): 4; John Miguel Lolorias, “As an Indian Sees It,” The Southern Workman 31/9 (1902) 476-80. “Lolorias” was an Anglicization of the O’odham pronunciation of “Dolores.”

[7] John Lolorias, “Address,” Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, 1901, ed. Isabel C. Barrows (New York: Lake Mohonk Conference, 1902), 76-77.

[8] Dolores and Mathiot, “The Reminiscences of Juan Dolores” (n. 5 above): 294, 309, 312-13.

[9] Letter to Edward Sapir, November 4, 1917, in Victor Golla, ed., The Sapir-Kroeber Correspondence: Letters Between Edward Sapir and A. L. Kroeber, 1905 – 1925 (Berkeley: Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, University of California, Berkeley), 260.

[10] Documents relating to Dolores’s university employment are in Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.

[11] “Indian to Lecture Here,” San Francisco Examiner, November 21, 1911: 2.

[12] Dolores to Kroeber, December 22, 1925, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[13] Dolores to Kroeber, February 25, 1926, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[14] “Juan, Indian, Defies Alphabet,” San Francisco Examiner, February 3, 1911: 3.

[15] “Indian Guards U.C. Relics of Fathers,” The Ripon Record, May 6, 1927: 5.

[16] “U.C. Co-ed and Indian Marry,” Oakland Tribune, November 20, 1935: 1; “Papago Indian and White Woman Marry,” Arizona Daily Star, November 21, 1935: 1.

[17] “Indian’s Bride to Teach at Chicago,” Minneapolis Star Tribune, November 26, 1935, p. 10; “Indian’s Bride to Help Him Write Book,” Oakland Tribune, November 21, 1935: 21.

[18] Juan Dolores, “Papago Verb Stems,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 10 (1913): 241-63; Juan Dolores, “Papago Nominal Stems,” University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 20 (1923): 19-31; Juan Dolores, “Papago Nicknames,” in Essays in Anthropology in Honor of A. L. Kroeber in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday, June 11, 1936, ed. Robert H. Lowie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1936), 45-47.

[19] Lila M. O’Neale and Juan Dolores, “Notes on Papago Color Designations,” American Anthropologist 45 (1943): 394.

[20] Kroeber to Dolores, April 16, 1927, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[21] Dolores to Kroeber, July 26, 1947, A. L. Kroeber Papers, BANC MSS C-B 925, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Box 13:15.

[22] Voegelin to Kroeber, July 9, 1948, Ethnological Documents of the Department and Museum of Anthropology, BANC FILM 2216, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley, 134.8.1.

[23] J. Alden Mason, The Language of the Papago of Arizona (Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania, 1950), 3.

[24] Dolores to Kroeber, December 26, 1919, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[25] Kroeber to Dolores, March 9, 1920, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[26] Dolores to Kroeber, August 23, 1921, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[27] Dolores to Kroeber, October 31, 1922, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[28] Dolores to Kroeber, May 10, 1911, Records (n. 2 above), Box 11.

[29] On Ishi, see chapter 7 of Garrett, Unnaming of Kroeber Hall (first note above), and references cited there.

[30] “First Train Ride for Nogi Indian,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 5, 1911: 3; “President and Senate to Make Treaty with Aborigine,” Oroville Daily Register, September 4, 1911: 1.

[31] Dolores to Kroeber, September 10, 1911, Records (n. 2 above), Box 11.

[32] Dolores to Kroeber, January 4, 1914, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.

[33] E. W. Gifford to Dolores, October 30, 1918, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.

[34] Dolores to Gifford, November 3, 1918, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.

[35] Dolores to Kroeber, August 2, 1920, Records (n. 2 above), Box 16.

[36] Theodore Kroeber to Alfred Kroeber, November 15, 1947, Theodora Kroeber Quinn Papers, AA-15, Arizona State Museum Library, University of Arizona.

[37] This and subsequent quotations from Ursula K. Le Guin are to The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination (Boston: Shambala, 2004), 14-17.

[38] Dolores to Kroeber, December 22, 1930, Records (n. 2 above), Box 49.

[39] Beyer to Kroeber, June 15, 1937, Kroeber Papers (n. 21 above), Box 13:16.

[40] Vavages to Kroeber, April 16, 1947, Kroeber Quinn Papers (n. 36 above).

[41] Vavages to Kroeber, July 22, 1948, Kroeber Quinn Papers (n. 36 above).

[42] Ethnological Documents (n. 22 above), 134.1.15, p. 62.

[43] Ethnological Documents (n. 22 above), 134.4E.

[44] In Berkeley, they are in the Ethnological Documents (n. 22 above); in Tucson, they are in the Kroeber Quinn Papers (n. 36 above); in Philadelphia, they are in the John Alden Mason Papers, Mss.B.M384, American Philosophical Society Library.

[45] Dolores and Mathiot, “The Reminiscences of Juan Dolores” (n. 5 above); Saxton and Saxton, O’othham Hoho’ok A’agitha (n. 4 above).

Andrew Garrett is a professor of linguistics and the Nadine M. Tang and Bruce L. Smith Professor of Cross-Cultural Social Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also director of the California Language Archive.

Excerpts

Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond

on February 7, 2023

By: Christina Dunbar-Hester

Oil Beach: How Toxic Infrastructure Threatens Life in the Ports of Los Angeles and Beyond by Christina Dunbar-Hester, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2023 by Christina Dunbar-Hester. All rights reserved.

Coastal Translocations: Watery Life in Captivity

The Aquarium of the Pacific was founded in the 1990s during a period of questions about what to do with Long Beach’s harbor area. Much of the coast in San Pedro Bay is devoted to industrial use, and the entire shoreline is manipulated. On the far side of the port complex, near the border with Orange County, is a recreational beach. But the waterfront area right between the beach and the port, nearest to downtown Long Beach, had been subject to “ups, downs, and an identity crisis,” in the words of a New York Times reporter writing in 2000.35 In the very early twentieth century, the waterfront hosted the Pike, a Coney-Island-esque bathing area, boardwalk, and amusement park featuring rides and games, concessions, an elaborate hand-carved carousel, and, in a later era, tattoo shops (the buildup to World War II brought the navy to the harbor, and sailors brought demand for tattoos).36 

In 1979, the Pike was formally shuttered, though it was well off its heyday before then. The area retained some tourist attractions, notably the docked RMS Queen Mary ocean liner, Howard Hughes’s massive wooden plane, the Spruce Goose (encased in a custom-built geodesic dome), and an annual Grand Prix motor race, begun in 1975.37 But the area was underutilized by urban development standards, and the city considered how to update it. The Disney Corporation managed both the Spruce Goose and the Queen Mary starting in 1988.38 Around then, Disney expressed interest in siting a massive ocean-related theme park in the Long Beach harbor, to be called DisneySea; the entire complex was to include a research center and resort, and to be collectively called Port Disney.39 Fantastical artistic renderings of the complex resembled the contemporary Biosphere 2 artificial environment, with a glistening science-fiction sheen evocative of the space age. But these plans were short-lived; the park was never built.40 The harbor nonetheless contained glimpses of futuristic fancy: a 1967 artist’s rendering of an oil island at night rivals the Disney imaginary; and the Queen Mary and dome, although divested by Disney in the 1990s, still remain today. 

Fantastical harbor flourishes aside, the 1990s hit Long Beach hard economically. The navy consolidated its Southern California presence in San Diego, closing a naval station and hospital as well as shuttering a shipyard in the Long Beach harbor. In turn, aviation manufacturing plants reliant on military contracts also closed. It was in this context that the city looked to cultivate tourist attractions, with or without Disney’s involvement. (Simultaneously, the region pursued port development as an economic strategy.) It secured municipal financing to build an aquarium—albeit a more modest, far less spectacular one than the facility Disney had planned—and develop the harbor with a shopping center and refurbished convention center.41 The aquarium was paid for through government funding and philanthropic contributions, although indirectly the municipal funds were tied to the city’s oil revenues.42 The city owns the aquarium, which is managed and operated by a nonprofit organization.43 

Public institutions for the display of animals emerged in larger Euro-American cities in the nineteenth century, often with funding from scientific societies.44  Projects of taxonomy and empire, displaying unfamiliar animals from other locales, zoos and aquariums both satisfied and stoked public interest in animal life. Some early American zoos also bore the influence of the urban parks movement, emphasizing conservation of native species. Zoos often resembled amusement parks, offering children rides on ponies and Galápagos tortoises, transporting visitors around the parks on buses and trains, and dramatically exhibiting trained seals and chimpanzees to enthralled audiences, according to historian Pamela Henson. Not unlike circus sideshows, they emphasized the novelty and exoticism of their offerings, and they competed with other zoos, even to the point of keeping animal care regimens secret.45 By the middle of the twentieth century, conservation emerged as a more consistent concern, and zoos were coming under fire for animal exploitation and poor conditions.46 By the late twentieth century, zoos had brought conservation fully into their remit, including cooperating to serve as genetic reservoirs for endangered species, sharing information and resources, and addressing conservation in exhibits and mission statements.47 

The RMS Queen Mary ocean liner with Spruce Goose dome. Long Beach, 2011. Photo by David Jones, CC- BY 2.0 license.

Both the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Aquarium of the Pacific’s work with otters is in line with these trends. Zoos and aquariums conduct conservation work both in situ and ex situ, in field sites.48 But aquariums, unlike zoos, often work closely with local wildlife officials too.49 The aquariums’ otter work involves housing a native (sub)species whose numbers have dwindled in the wild with the goals of educating the public and expanding the population, within the parameters of their own institutional mandates and constraints.50 

As noted above, MBA has had ambitious otter conservation programs central to its mission since its inception. The Aquarium of the Pacific has also hosted otters since its earliest days. When it was founded in 1998, otters were not local to the immediate Southern California coastal area near Long Beach, due to the otter-free zone, though of course they were ecologically native to the area. The Aquarium of the Pacific immediately worked closely with MBA to host otters, offering housing and care for otters that could not live in the wild; this allowed the two institutions working together to care for more animals than MBA could alone. The Aquarium of the Pacific declared its first full summer in operation, 1999, to be “Sea Otter Summer,” with a full public relations blitz. Its charismatic otters were Monterey Bay transplants, young animals who were not suitable candidates for release into the wild and instead resided in the Aquarium of the Pacific’s Northern Pacific habitat (here Northern Pacific means essentially California and north, that is, the cooler water zone north of the warm-cold mixing in the ecotone that is the Southern California Bight). At least two of the otters were orphaned during El Niño storms in 1997 (rough water and wind can cause pups to get separated from mothers, and storms are a common cause of pup stranding).51 Given the timing, these young animals would not have been candidates for surrogacy, which did not begin until 2001. 

One of the Aquarium of the Pacific’s otters, a young female aptly named Summer, featured in a heartbreaking and frankly bizarre Los Angeles Times article that accompanied the exhibition: 

A little girl named Summer arrived in Long Beach last month with what sounds like a Hollywood crisis: a lousy fur coat, a weight problem and a dependency issue. Summer, an 11-month-old sea otter at the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, also would be distressed to know she’s missing her spot in the limelight. This Saturday the aquarium will launch Sea Otter Summer, but the budding diva will be in rehab.52 

Distressing anthropomorphism and peculiar pathologizing aside, the article paints a vivid picture of the struggles stranded otters and their human caregivers can face. When rescued by MBA, Summer’s caregivers hoped to rehabilitate her for release into the wild, but over time, she failed to thrive: her coat did not come in with sufficient thickness to keep her afloat and warm, which was evident when human handlers took her on daily ocean swims as part of rehabilitation efforts. (Otters’ coats are dense, and pups’ fur actually helps them float because of how it traps air, which saves their bodies energy. The drive to commodify this lustrous fur is what led otters to be hunted to near extinction.53) Summer did not gain sufficient weight, probably because of being chilled. And her “addiction” to suckling towels was an unfortunate effect of her separation from her mother when she was only one week old.54 

Chloe the otter standing up, reaching toward her handler. Aquarium of the Pacific Virtual Otter Encounter, 2020. Screenshot by the author.

Aquarium curators laid out a comprehensive plan of care for Summer. Her towel suckling appeared to be a core cause of her failure to thrive. Without otters to care for pups, human handlers gave otter pups towels to suckle, cuddle, and groom themselves with, “a replacement for their moms.” Handlers suspected the enthusiasm with which Summer took to snuggling and suckling towels was actually damaging her fur; according to laboratory analysis of her pelt, the fibers were twisted and damaged. So in addition to continuing to trying to get her weight up through attentive feeding, caregivers weaned the pup off towels: she went from one per hour to two per day, with the goal of being able to comfortably give them up entirely. Her handler said: “The rewards of the job are similar to those of parenting[.] I enjoy the satisfaction of seeing the otters hit certain milestones. I also think it’s a responsible act. Summer couldn’t survive in the ocean, but she’s healthy. Why not give her a good life, while educating the public and us about how otters live so we can use the knowledge to help the environment?”55 

Summer lived another eleven years at the Aquarium of the Pacific, though she never fully recovered from the health issues she experienced as a pup. Aquarium staff tried to diagnose and cure Summer, unsuccessfully; veterinary dermapathologists suspected her fur and thermoregulation issues perhaps ultimately derived from an immune-mediated condition, similar to an autoimmune disease in humans.56 The causes of autoimmune disease are complex, but exposures to toxins are strong possibilities; effects of chemical violence are not necessarily immediate, even leading to epigenetic harms.57 In spite of Summer’s health problems, aquarium officials stated that she had led a “relatively healthy and apparently happy” life with her exhibit-mates at the Aquarium of the Pacific, until reaching a more advanced age when her health declined again, leading to compromised organ function. They determined that euthanasia was the most humane course, but Summer died on her own hours before the planned procedure, in September 2010.58 Twelve years is a somewhat shorter lifespan than might be expected for a female otter in captivity, though not dramatically so. Her loss was mourned by aquarium staff and caregivers, many of whom had known her since her arrival. 

Around the time of Summer’s death in 2010, the Aquarium of the Pacific opened a new animal care facility. The 14,000-square-foot facility was unusual in one main regard: it included a large room for veterinary exams open to the public (through a pane of glass). On most days, aquarium staff perform veterinary exams and medical procedures on aquarium animals, in public view, with either a staff interpreter out in front of the window or one inside who explains what staff are doing over a public address system for viewers outside. Simulations of veterinary procedures are on display even when the aquarium is closed. 

One day in September 2019, two otter dental procedures were listed on a whiteboard: a root canal for Betty, age seven, and a tooth extraction for Maggie, age seventeen.59 A curator said that there is treatment activity on public view at least a couple of days per week, and that the facility conducts nearly every procedure in public view (exceptions might be if no interpretive staff were available to narrate, or in case of a high-stakes procedure where the patient might be in danger of “crashing,” in which case blinds would be drawn). An adult sea otter would get at least one exam per year, including blood draws, x-rays, and an ultrasound, all during regular business hours in full public view.60 The aquarium holds around 11,000 animals (fish, reptiles, mammals, birds), so there is a lot of opportunity for routine exams that can double as public programming.61 While the Aquarium of the Pacific’s public viewing facility was novel at the time it was introduced, more and more facilities like it are being built; it is a trend that promotes public understanding of and transparency about the institution’s activities.62 (Though the curator did not spell this out, it also helps communicate to the public the expense associated with so much care for so many animals.) At the same time, the procedures with the aquarium’s actual living animals, and especially the use of plush children’s toys to stand in for wildlife, arguably domesticate these creatures, blurring boundaries. These spectacles also normalize “nature” in human care, or even on life support. Though managers act in pursuit of “autonomy” for wild animals, this state is “deferred and impossible to achieve,” requiring dependence (especially in the case of highly managed creatures at the edge of extinction).63 This has potential implications for how the aquarium’s audience relates to these animals in the aquarium as well as outside of it. 

Photo by Christina Dunbar-Hester, September 2019

As of 2020, the Aquarium of the Pacific could house up to six adult otters comfortably, but it was expanding its capacity in order to implement a surrogacy program. The agreement the Aquarium of the Pacific formalized with MBA in early 2020 solidified a commitment to create the conditions to be able to add as many as five adult females who could nurture and socialize pups. As many as ten to fifteen stranded southern sea otter pups are discovered annually in California, so this would add significant capacity for otter care. Like Summer, all stranded pups will first go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for around eight weeks, and then some will move to Long Beach for longer-term rearing (six to seven months), learning to groom and feed and act like “regular” sea otters.64 If a pup does well with its surrogate mother in the Aquarium of the Pacific, it will return to MBA for another month or two to socialize with peers, and then, assuming it is deemed fit, it will be released into the wild. Released young adults will be radiotagged with VHF transmitters and trackable for up to three years; scientists will no longer be able to track the otters once the transmitters’ batteries die, though the tracking devices will remain in the animals for the rest of their lives. 

Sea otters come ashore rarely and can perform all essential life functions at sea, including sleeping and giving birth. Charismatic representations of them often feature a mother and pup afloat in a kelp bed.65 The otters of the Aquarium of the Pacific, as well as many other creatures, live in marine water that approximates their oceanic habitats. The aquarium’s water supply therefore is a life-sustaining consideration of major consequence for the institution and its residents. It is sourced from the harbor just outside the aquarium’s door, processed by a company that also supplies water to other aquariums and marine science facilities throughout the western United States and for which the Aquarium of the Pacific is a major customer. 

Founded in 1988, Catalina Water Company commodifies a naturally occurring substance, ocean water.66 In claiming water as a resource, processing it, and selling it, the company provides an environment to sustain ocean life in circumstances where it would not be found otherwise: in conditions of captivity and often in geographic locales far from the species’ native environments. Tropical fish in home or institutional aquariums, otters in conservation programs, jellyfish in veterinary care, and mollusks in neuroscience research settings may all find themselves swimming in this water (or, in the case of mollusks, anchored in it). Commodification of ocean water is driven by the commercial trade of tropical fish: “The aquarium hobby could never have become what it is today without the business interests that were, and still are, involved.”67 Recent estimates are that 25–30 million animals from more than 2,000 species are traded annually, including fish and corals; animals are imported from the Philippines, Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Australia, Fiji, the Maldives, and Palau, especially richly biodiverse reef ecologies; and domestic fish outnumber pet cats and dogs in both the United States and United Kingdom.68 Most collectible animals are taken from the wild, and many marine species’ needs for breeding in captivity are poorly understood.69 Of course, this practice of removing animals from oceans for global hobbyist trade has ecological implications in their sites of origin. These accumulating environmental injuries are not the main focus here but bear notice as a significant effect of the commodification of marine life and seawater.70 

Unsurprisingly, supplying conditions for marine life, let alone healthy marine life, is challenging. The Aquarium of the Pacific’s water comes from the Pacific Ocean via Catalina Water Company, but another option for coastal aquariums is building a water intake system with pipes going out into the sea to take in and discharge water. (A curator at the Aquarium of the Pacific speculated that this would be hard to gain approval for in California’s present-day regulatory environment.71) Facilities that are not coastally located are more likely to manufacture their water, mixing salt and fresh water. Catalina Water Company touts its product by stating, “All synthetic salt mixtures have one thing in common. They are attempting to duplicate real saltwater. Catalina Water Company provides real ocean salt- water, not a synthetic substitute. Synthetic Saltwater, while being basically sound, simply can not provide all the subtle chemical benefits of true saltwater.” The volume of water that the company sells for simulated ocean environments is at least ten million gallons per year.72 The Aquarium of the Pacific is a major client and takes several deliveries per week; its biggest tank, as of 2012, was a 56,000-gallon quarantine tank, part of the Molina Care Center, a holding tank for large animals that need to be kept separately.73 Deliveries of fresh ocean water at the scale needed by aquariums are delivered via truck in food-grade stainless steel tankers. Catalina Water Company also sells packaged seawater for home aquarium use through the PetCo pet store chain.74 

Truck delivering Catalina Water Company seawater (“Real Ocean Water”) to laboratory at California State University, Northridge, 2016. Courtesy Mike Kaiser.

The quarantine tank leads toward a further consideration of the water itself. To become commodified, seawater must be processed. Catalina Water Company notes on its website that it “starts with natural ocean sea- water which is filtered, (fiber, sand, and charcoal) ozonated, and protein skimmed.”75 Before using the water for its marine life, the Aquarium of the Pacific also runs its own tests to make sure it is safe for the animals, and filters it again.76 The 1999 Los Angeles Times article about Summer the pup also offers details about how seriously the Aquarium of the Pacific takes its marine environment: “Before he climbs the metal ladder to the access door of Summer’s tank, [Summer’s handler] steps in two bins of liquid, one containing water and one a disinfectant. He’ll step in them again when he leaves. ‘We’re fussy about quarantine here,’ he explains. ‘I don’t want to take any germs into her habitat or out to the rest of the aquarium.’”77 Of course, extra precautions are indeed necessary for public health in congregate settings (as the COVID-19 pandemic recently showed when the virus cut a tragic, lethal, and preventable path through prisons and elder care facilities). 

But this attention to hygiene, water filtration, and monitoring in the aquarium setting exposes an irony. Otters and other life-forms under custodial care of the aquarium are provided cleaner and safer water than their counterparts in the wild. As noted at the outset of this chapter, worries of otter annihilation in the wake of an oil discharge prompted conservation efforts in the 1980s, leading to, among other developments, the otter relocation to San Nicolas Island. The rationale was not only to prompt the settlement of a new territory but to have a population reservoir in a more protected locale, less vulnerable to spills than the near-coastal area the otters inhabited. And spilled oil is not the only source of chemical harm for otters: industrial agricultural fertilizers and other contaminants wash into the ocean from land, bringing toxins that can sicken and even kill marine otters.78 Toxins should thus not be understood as mere “wayward molecules”: they are substances whose patterned presences in land, water, and bodies are indicative of particular political and economic relations.79

FOOTNOTES

35) Sterngold, “Long Beach.” His statement is about Long Beach generally but it fits the waterfront area well.

36) As of 2020, parts of the carousel and vestigial Pike games are on display at Looff ’ Lite- A- Line on Long Beach Boulevard.

37) The Queen Mary docked permanently in Long Beach in 1967. Th e Spruce Goose was housed there only from 1980– 92, but its dome remains and is currently used as Carnival Cruise Lines’ dockside cruise terminal.

38) Kopetman, “Spruce Goose to Be Moved.”

39) Addison, “Long Beach Lost.”

40) Various factors were responsible. Disney requested things the City of Long Beach was unable to deliver single- handedly, like highway modifi cations. Addison, “Long Beach Lost,” notes that Long Beach was hard to build in both politically and financially since local, state, and federal approvals were all required; Disney instead reinvested in and expanded its Anaheim (Orange County) operations.

41) Sterngold, “Long Beach.”

42) Johnson, “Long Beach, Calif., Gets a Boost.” Th e “tidelands grant” the state issued the city to develop the harbor stipulated that revenue from oil profi ts drilled from the Wilmington and Long Beach oil fi elds, located in the tidelands, be reinvested in the tidelands area (and overseen by the state).

43) Kingsley, “Aquarium of the Pacific Turns 20 Today.”

44) Young, “Zoos and Aquariums.”

45) Henson, “American Zoos,” 65, 70, 66.

46) Young, “Zoos and Aquariums”; Henson, “American Zoos,” 72.

47) Henson, “American Zoos,” 66; Braverman, Zooland.

48) Henson writes, “as ‘natural environments’ become more stressed through development and climate change, the line has become blurred between ex situ, orzoo- and aquarium-based, research and conservation and in situ, or field-based, biological research and conservation practice” (“American Zoos,” 66); see especially Braverman, Wild Life, for more on this troubled boundary.

49) Muka, “Conservation Constellations.”

50) The California or southern sea otter is classified as a subspecies of an otter whose range used to be the entire Pacific coast from Baja California to Alaska. It is now only found from about Point Conception, just north and west of Santa Barbara, to San Francisco; in other words, just north of the Southern California Bight into which San Pedro Bay is nestled.

51) Morris, “Long Beach Aquarium.”

52) Jameson, “She’s One Happy Pup.”

53) Further north in the Pacific Northwest, Russian traders established a sea otter fur trade with China in the mid- eighteenth century (Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods). Otter hunting in fact drew Russians eastward fromSiberia. Spanish colonists in California did not initially recognize the value of otter pelts in “their” territories but soon also entered the otter fur trade with China, and these otters were members of the southern or California sea otter subspecies.

In both cases, Indigenous people also participated in these markets as hunters, though they oft en were resistant to hunting on the scale desired by merchants (Ogden, California Sea Otter Trade, 1784–1848, 43). Overhunting of otters is part of what pushed American maritime traders toward beavers in the nineteenth century (Gibson, Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods).

54) Jameson, “She’s One Happy Pup.”

55) Jameson. Th e journalist noted that the handler was himself a father of two, tying his parental duties with the otter to those with his human young.

56) Segura, “Long Beach Aquarium’s Beloved Otter Dies.” In humans, poisons like PCBs and dioxin have been detected in blood, breast milk, and urine (Murphy, “Alterlife,” 495).

57) Murphy invokes a stencil by Métis artist and activist Erin Marie Konsmo depicting lungs filled with transformer towers connecting to underground fracking, accompanied by the statement “Violence from Fracking [and Pipelines] is Violence on Our Bodies” (“Alterlife,” 500– 501). Though the image depicts human lungs, the statement fits animal bodies as well—though chemical violence is not limited to fossil fuels, of course. See also Fiske, “Naked in the Face of Contamination”; Tuana, “Viscous Porosity.”

58) Segura, “Long Beach Aquarium’s Beloved Otter Dies.”

59) Field notes, September 2019.

60) Aquarium of the Pacific curator, interview, December 7, 2020.

61) Aquarium of the Pacific, “Aquarium Animal Care.”

62) Aquarium of the Pacific curator, interview, December 7, 2020.

63) Parreñas, Decolonizing Extinction, 155; van Dooren, Flight Ways.

64) Aquarium of the Pacific curator, interview, December 7, 2020.

65) Mothers will even wrap pups in kelp to hold them in place and keep them afloat while they go off to forage (e.g. Kranking, “Floating through Life”).

66) The company is presumably named for the island that Spanish settlers dubbed Santa Catalina, one of the Channel Islands, just off shore from Los Angeles and Long Beach. It hosts tourism and marine research, and its rock is the source material for many modifications in San Pedro Bay.

67) Brunner, Ocean at Home, 140– 41.

68) Brunner, “Through a Glass Sadly.”

69) Brunner, Ocean at Home, 141. This is probably less a function of breeding being impossible to do and more that there is little profit motive to attempt it.

70) Brunner notes that only one in ten fi sh caught for aquarium trade survives the shipping and trade process and ends up in a hobby tank (“Through a Glass Sadly”). Toxic injury is also relevant here: Brunner adds that poisons are sometimes used in the water to numb or stun fish and make them easier to capture, and excess poison remains in the water after stunned fish are captured. The habitat effects call to mind Nixon’s description of “delayed destruction” (Slow Violence, 2; see also Neimanis, “‘Chemists’ War’”)

71) Aquarium of the Pacific curator, interview, December 7, 2020. The curator added that Monterey Bay Aquarium, built in the 1980s, has such a system.

72) Catalina Water Company, homepage.

73) Aquarium of the Pacific curator, interview, December 7, 2020; Aquarium of the Pacific, “Molina Animal Care Center.”

74) Catalina Water Company, homepage.

75) Catalina Water Company, homepage. Punctuation per original.

76) Aquarium of the Pacific curator, interview, December 7, 2020.

77) Jameson, “She’s One Happy Pup.”

78) Aquarium of the Pacific, “Sea Otter Conservation.” Parasites can also wash out
from land.

79) Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism, 82; Murphy, “Alterlife.”

SOURCES

Addison, Brian. “Long Beach Lost: The Dramatic Tale of the Disney Theme Park in Downtown.” Long Beach Post, December 4, 2018.

Aquarium of the Pacific. “Aquarium Animal Care.” Accessed December 5, 2020. https://www.aquariumofpacific.org/exhibits/animalcarecenter/animal_care.
—. “Molina Animal Care Center.” Accessed December 23, 2020.
https://www.aquariumofpacific.org/ exhibits/animalcarecenter.
—. “Sea Otter Conservation.” Accessed December 5, 2020.
https://www.aquariumofpacific.org/exhibits/otters/sea_otter_conservation.
—. “Sea Otter Habitat.” Accessed March 11, 2022.
https://www.aquariumofpacific.org/exhibits/otters/
—. “Southern Sea Otter.” Accessed December 5, 2020.
https://www.aquariumofpacific.org/exhibits/otters/southern _sea_otter.

Braverman, Irus. Wild Life: The Institution of Nature. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015.
—. Zooland: The Institution of Captivity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Brunner, Bernd. The Ocean at Home. London: Reaktion Books, 2011.
—. “Th rough a Glass Sadly.” Aeon, November 30, 2015. https://aeon.co/essays/why-it-s-time-to-put-an-end-to-the-cult-of-the-aquarium.

Henson, Pamela M. “American Zoos: A Shift ing Balance between Recreation and Conservation.” In Th e Ark and Beyond: Th e Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation, ed. Ben Minteer, Jane Maienschein, and James P. Collins, 65–76. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 2018.

Jameson, Marnell. “She’s One Happy Pup: A Young Otter Name [sic] Summer Once Faced Certain Death, but Today Is Safe, Warm and Getting a Good, if Soggy, Education.” Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1999.

Kingsley, Barbara. “Aquarium of the Pacific Turns 20 Today, Hopes to Make a Splash When Pacific Visions Opens in 2019.” Daily Breeze, June 15, 2018.

Kopetman, Roxana. “Spruce Goose to Be Moved to Oregon.” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1992.

Morris, Asia. “Long Beach Aquarium Mourns the Loss of Brook the Sea Otter.” Long Beach Post, January 30, 2019.

Muka, Samantha. “Conservation Constellations: Aquariums in Aquatic Conservation Networks.” In The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation, ed. Ben Minteer, Jane Maienschein, and James P. Collins, 90– 103. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Sterngold, James. “Long Beach, in Los Angeles’ Shadow, Strives for a Spotlight.” New York Times, July 27, 2000, A14.

Christina Dunbar-Hester is a science and technology studies scholar and associate professor in the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication. She is the author of Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest, and Politics in FM Radio Activism and Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures.

Interviews

Kinship and Cultural Resistance to Environmental Racism in Avocado Heights, California 

on January 24, 2023

Kinship and Cultural Resistance to Environmental Racism in Avocado Heights, California 

On December 13, 2022, Quemetco, Inc. (also known as Ecobat), a battery smelter in City of Industry, California, agreed to pay $2.3 million in a civil settlement litigation brought on by the Department of Toxic and Substances Control (DTSC). Along with committing to infrastructural corrective measures and an acknowledgement of violations, Quemetco will distribute $1.5 million to DTSC in civil penalties and $575,000, split between two local environmental justice projects. While this is the largest settlement yet for Quemetco, it has a long history of neglect and contamination in San Gabriel Valley, California, and even globally. 

Quemetco, operating at this location since 1959 as Western Lead Producers, recovers lead from automobile batteries and other miscellaneous lead scrap materials. Currently processing over a million pounds of batteries per day (600 tons), it operates seven days per week, 24 hours per day, though the furnaces “may” operate 16-20 hours per day.1 Their chief pollutants are arsenic, lead, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, and nitrogen oxides (NOx); arsenic being the highest contributor to the health, degradation, and risk of the community.2 

Quemetco traces to previous and infamous environmental disasters such as The Stringfellow Acid Pits.3 This toxic waste dump located in Jurupa Valley, California became the center of national news coverage in the early 1980s, when it was considered one of the most polluted sites in California and one of the origin cases in environmental justice discourse.4 During Stringfellow’s 16 years of operation, 34 million gallons (about 128703940 L) plus of liquid waste was deposited in evaporation ponds and between 1969 and 1980 poor weather and management resulted in several spills and intentional releases of toxic chemicals into local creeks and storm channels. It was found that Quemetco dumped the tenth largest volume of toxic waste at these acid pits. From 1956-72, under the name Western Lead Producers, Quemetco dumped one million gallons of toxic waste.5 

Text from United States v. Stringfellow, 661 F. Supp. 1053, 1061, 17 ELR 21134 (C.D. Cal. 1987), 11

For decades, ambient lead measurements in neighborhoods near Quemetco reflect levels far above the National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) with the maximum individual cancer risks modeled at 33.4 ppm. Reports by the DTSC in 1992 and 2006, along with an independent CAC (Clean Air Coalition) and USC Department of Environmental Health surveys conducted in 2016 show on average that most residential houses within a two-mile radius harbor around 117 ppm.6 The highest concentration in Avocado Heights was 2,427 ppm.7  

Since 1991, Quemetco and state regulatory agencies knew 8 However, no cleanup was conducted as a result. DTSC “excoriated Quemetco in a 2014 memorandum,” writing how “more often than not, Quemetco is not in compliance with the provisions in their General Permit.”9 A serial violator, Quemetco has also been issued with multiple violations over the years, for problems such as illegally storing hazardous waste and delaying rebuilds of eroding (corroding) infrastructure. 

Quemetco failed to comply with various conditions including a 2005 general permit.10 Since their 2013 draft report, DTSC has not approved of the plans to monitor gas, liquid, and surface water discharge. Reporter Daniel Ross in an article on Truthout writes, “The Department of Toxic Substances Control has fallen down badly on its job of protecting the public from toxic harm.” In 2014, DTSC representatives wrote, “Quemetco appears to have been consistently discharging elevated levels of lead” into the San Jose Creek, which runs contiguous with the plant. The Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board issued letters in 2010 and 2015 stating they were “exceeding the benchmark values for lead, zinc, pH and specific conductance.” While soil and air pollution are serious matters, water is another level. The “EPA has set the maximum contaminant level goal for lead in drinking water at zero,” thus any violation concerning water poses an immediate and dire risk for public and environmental health.11 

Over the years, while the lead leakage diminished, emissions are regular. Arsenic, benzene, 1,3- butadiene, remain a constant. In fact, 1,3- butadiene appears to be increasing.12 Mitigation means little when it comes to contamination. With the arsenic plume of 2013 and all the other carcinogenic metals leaching into the soil, plants, animals, water, and air over the years, the damage is done. Arsenic and lead, among so many toxic metals, stay in the soil for thousands of years. 

Video of Quemetco: Courtesy of Avocado Heights Vaquer@s

Quemetco was also linked to the transportation of waste material to Exide in Vernon, California before its closure. Exide Technologies was one of two west coast battery smelters before it went bankrupt in 2020 due to the resistance efforts of East Yards Communities for Environmental Justice. Quemetco consistently denies affiliation with Exide, but a DTSC 2020 lawsuit reveals an irrefutable working relationship between Quemetco and Exide over at least twenty-seven years.13 Quemetco has a history of negligent and reckless behavior in arranging and transporting caustic material with lack of regard or concern for neighborhood residents. Coincidentally, Quemetco was in favor of Exide’s closure so that it could eliminate any competition.14 

Quemetco’s footprint not only affects local communities but has state, national, and global reach. All these batteries, despite Quemetco’s claims, arrive from local as well as international sources.15 Ecobat, their parent company, has extraction operations in South Africa and South America, with distribution centers and smelters in Europe. It is important to remember that the lead is made into ingots to be sold again. Quemetco is not a public service offering responsible recycling options for batteries. It is a multinational extraction-based business designed for profit.  

After three years of relative quiet, in 2022, Quemetco emerged with an application to expand their facility by 25 percent (from 600 tons to 750 tons of lead-material per day).16 In a neighboring unincorporated town, Avocado Heights, California, a group called Avocado Heights Vaquer@s (AHV) are fighting back. Avocado Heights, with 80 percent of the population from Mexico—most from Jalisco or Zacatecas—is a unique equestrian district in San Gabriel Valley with a community of parcels between a half-acre to an acre, containing lots large enough to have seven horses each and run small agricultural business. Until recently, Avocado Heights was working class, however, given the scarcity of large parcels within Los Angeles County they are constantly at war with developers hoping to flip properties, in combination with warehouses and manufacturing developments that are zealous to convert zoning ordinances. Yet even more horrifying, due to Avocado Height’s proximity to the City of Industry, environmental degradation, pollution, and contamination has adverse effects on the community as private and public surveys prove a higher frequency of respiratory problems such as asthma and rare cancer. 

(Red indicates 90-100 percentile [highest score], orange indicates 80-90 percentile, and yellow indicates 70-80 percentile. Click on a census tract to learn more about the CalEnviroScreen scores. CalEnviroScreen scores are calculated by the scores of Pollution Burden and Population Characteristics. CalEnviroScreen provides a report with detailed description of indicators and methodology and downloadable results available at CalEnviroScreen 4.0 website.)

Founded in January of 2022, AHV became a serious force within the region, not only fostering support and fighting the expansion of Quemetco, but joining regional coalitions to protect communities of color. Following the legacies of activists in the area who shut down the Exide battery recycling plant and the La Puente Landfill, AHV, “works towards the remediation, preservation, and expansion of air, waterway, and wildlife corridors that will serve our community and future generations as a network of vibrant uninterrupted ecosystems we can access and care for as environmental stewards.” They are organizers who believe that natural environmental spaces can coexist and thrive alongside equestrians, hikers, and cyclists, as educational community spaces for recreation. They are also members of the CAC and participate in other regional coalitions who are dedicated to shutting down Quemetco and fighting developers that want to convert agricultural and equestrian zoned parcels into manufacturing warehouses, reclamation facilities, and industries. 

One of the founding members of AHV joins Boom California to discuss the connections between cultural sovereignty, environmental racism, and activism. As with many disruptive environmental justice efforts across California, AHV members face serious legal and personal threats, thus the interviewee will remain anonymous.  

Boom 

Can you tell us a bit about Avocado Heights and what makes it unique? 

AHV 

What makes Avocado Heights unique is its rural aspect, and that it has an equestrian culture. It is past East LA, in the San Gabriel Valley, not too far from Los Angeles, in a suburban and industrial area. Even though we’re surrounded by lots of factories, the neighborhood is small and feels tightknit. You’ll walk your dog or go on a stroll and see people on horses, people walking ponies, or training little foals. There are even goats and chickens and roosters here. It’s beautiful, in that sense. 

Close ties between neighbors and friends make this the closest thing to a pueblo I’ve experienced. Each day I am reminded why spaces like this are important. These are spaces reminiscent of the rancherias in rural Mexico where a freshly groomed horse and polished leather saddle still carry cachet among locals–where a rag tag group of teens on borrowed horses meander aimlessly stringing along stories to keep entertained. 

Strolls in Avocado Heights become visits, usually there’s an invitation to share a beer and catch up. It’s the place where a lazy Sunday quickly transforms into an impromptu outdoor picnic with friends who might be fully engrossed in a volleyball tournament or karaoke duel. The park is our zocalo (the Jardin minus the kiosk). Our equestrian arena with white picket fence attracts throngs of spectators. Kids battle it out shooting hoops while an elotero takes a moment to rest before making another round past the baseball diamond which also doubles as a soccer field.  

Kelly, Howard D, “Avocado Heights, 4th Avenue and 3rd Avenue, looking northeast,” 1955, Los Angeles Public Library

Young couples walk towards the edge of the park before lounging for hours on the sloped hill. A group of friends enjoy mariscos from the lonchera fresh off a shift at one of the thousands of warehouses in the City of Industry and ruminate on the adventures that await them. Further off in the distance, admirers narrate which horses they like best and make note of which maneuvers impress them most. Nearby, a washed-up gangster lays flat across the grass and he’s coming off a bender. You recognize him a little, he was someone you went to middle school with. 

Sometimes you’ll hear folks refer to this place as North Whittier, Bassett, or La Puente. But for most of us, we prefer Avocado Heights after the massive avocado orchards that were first planted in the 1910’s when this tract was being billed to investors from Los Angeles as a lucrative investment. The area was called la Fortuna Farms, hoping this would generate interest and entice buyers. The land was later acquired by Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, a creditor who acquired the land as collateral after the markets crashed in the 1870s which drove previous landowning family patriarch William Workman to commit suicide.  

Boom  

Can you explain further what it means to be an equestrian district in Avocado Heights? 

AHV 

There are two parks in the community. One gets more use because of the skatepark. But the other park, Avocado Heights Park, is also a central hub, where all the vaqueros and vaqueras congregate. And on the weekends, or around special holidays, you’ll hear music. Hundreds of people will gather. You see people selling various products specific to the region. So, I think the equestrian aspect, it’s important for the community and the environment as well.  

The park is especially nice during the subtle chill of pre-Santa Ana winds, where you might find a horse steaming from its sweat as the charros lasso large circles above and around them. They intricately weave ritualistic patterns with the riata while a team of escaramuzas inside the round metal pen gallop diagonally towards each other in a circle before executing a full 180 and dispersing in such quick succession that the floating dust still hangs along the wind.  

We’re near the Avocado Heights equestrian trail which connects with the San Jose Creek trail. We could connect on horseback all the way to Azusa, down towards the beach, or hit the Puente Hills and ride towards Chino Hills. A lot of vaqueros and vaqueras will go horse-riding throughout the week, but especially on the weekends, they’ll do the trail rides. It’s so important that we’re mindful and conscious of the environment because it directly impacts everyone in the community. At this juncture, we’re interested in expanding public access to wildlife corridors or greenways, improving multi-use trails in our communities, and shaping development projects to offset adverse environmental impacts and to work towards a more resilient ecological system locally. 

(Yellow line indicates LA County DPR Trails. Click on the trail to discover information on trail use and access)

Boom  

You have illustrated how the story of avocado heights is a story of land. Between today and the evolution of Avocado Heights into Anglo-American settler history, rampant development and the encroachment of manufacturing facilities advanced in the 1970s, a period in which Avocado Heights increasingly faced serious threats to its cultural sovereignty and environment. In 1982, Benjamin Chavis coined the term “environmental racism” to signify the deliberate targeting of communities of color for toxic waste facilities. Do you think this is an appropriate term to apply to Avocado Heights and if so, would you elaborate on the scale of the issue? 

AHV 

I think that is an appropriate term. This past winter, a developer was in escrow with a private Christian university that goes by the name: Latin American Bible Institute. They were trying to sell to this developer who was going to build storage units or an industrial manufacturing warehouse. We got activated and we came together. We were loud. We’re like, “No! We will not be okay with this!” It’s something that has affected the community and continues to do so.  

Ever since we were children, nearby, there was a the La Puente Landfill. Avocado Heights is really close to City of Industry, La Puente, Bassett and North Whittier, which allowed for established coalitions, like Clean Air Coalition, to help put a stop to the landfill which significantly polluted the environment. People, members of that organization, also fought against the Athens Waste Facility: A big trash processing company near Valley Blvd. Because of them, and the City of Industry, there are a lot of big rigs. There is a lot of traffic and congestion in that area. The City of Industry has a plastic factory and companies like Goya, which you can smell, and which populate the neighborhood with their big rigs. Think of all the carbon and air pollution they emit. Then you consider the ambient, heavy metals they produce. These metals leech into our waterways and bed into our soil. This water is for drinking. Plants and animals depend on this water. The metals remain in the soil for thousands of years. All this industry, and the freeways, grip the borders of our unincorporated town. 

But our current and greatest antagonist, in my opinion, is Quemetco, which now goes by Ecobat. Quemetco has been around for decades operating as an extraordinarily reckless toxic battery recycling facility. Quemetco’s contaminating our air, soil, our water, releasing harmful chemicals into our environment, such as lead, arsenic, benzene, cadmium, and other heavy metals. But it’s a powerful multinational corperation with millions, if not billions of dollars, so they’re very good at covering their tracks or paying fees. They’ve made it abundantly clear that they don’t really care about our community. Why would they? They’re profiting, they have their business, and they don’t have our best interests at heart. Aside from a few postcards in the mail, they reach out to other commercial zones, like Hope City, to buffer their optics.  

They’re not going to do things like comprehensive soil sampling, which is why we must work hard, even though we’re a small collective. I’d say everyone is really dedicated, and we’re working with other people who are like-minded. We work with Clean Air Coalition or Active SGV or other environmental organizations that care about public health and want to fight against environmental racism. 

Boom 

Considering that you participate in several local coalitions, what do you think defines Avocado Heights Vaquer@s, differentiates it from these other groups? 

AHV 

A few things. Number one, in Avocado Heights, there hadn’t been organizing to the degree in which we do it. There are a lot of environmental and social justice groups in the San Gabriel Valley. There are some in La Puente and even Hacienda Heights. I don’t want to generalize, but some of them are very hierarchical or they’re not focused on meeting the needs of their community. There hadn’t been an organization in Avocado Heights, except the Clean Air Coalition. But that still wasn’t entirely representative of Avocado Heights itself, given that their base was in North Whittier. Their aims, while aligned with ours in many ways, differ. 

What makes Avocado Heights Vaquer@s different is the focus on family, or kinship, in our neighborhood. That’s what remains so special about our community. We help each other out. You see a neighbor in need, and you come. I was struggling another day with a horse, freaking out because the horse was stuck, and someone nearby came and helped me out. You see that here. In certain other neighborhoods you don’t. There’s a genuine authenticity, and I think that is part of it too, that cultural aspect where people from small little communities in Mexico bring these common traditions and customs to Avocado Heights. It’s a place where people who are from Mexico can come and feel comfortable. They’re like, “Oh, yeah, hey, this is how we do it in my pueblo!” 

Our family helps us out. If we are throwing an event, they’ll be there as much as possible, and they will support us. And I think that’s very special. We’re not a nonprofit. We don’t get money. We don’t have all the resources that a lot of other organizations have.  

Courtesy of Avocado Heights Vaquer@s

Boom  

Do you think there’s some part of the vaquero and vaquera culture that allows you to be unique stewards of the land, one that offers a new approach to environmentalism? 

AHV 

Organizing should also be fun as well as rigorous because otherwise people burn out and can get tired of always having to protest. Aside from that, I think nowadays, because of global warming and activism and social media, there’s this consciousness of: “We got to protect our environment. We got to get involved.” I hate to use the word trendy, it’s not a good word to use to describe caring about the environment, but in a way, it is. Certain people have cared about the environment for many, many generations before it’s become a hashtag. 

And part of it starts with our family, starts with your ancestors, starts with your traditions. I know when I go to indigenous spaces such as powwows, there’s an acknowledgment of Mother Earth. When it comes to land, our practice is to not take more than what you need. The honorable harvest: if you take something you give back. You use every single part of the animal because nothing should be wasted. In parts of Mexico, where my mom’s from, it’s that same kind of consciousness. It’s not like the way we think of environmentalism now. We are really paying attention to the stories, anecdotes, and wisdom of my mom’s teaching, or my grandmother’s. They were always mindful of the land. It was natural. That’s how they grew up.  

Boom  

Are there certain goals that AHV are attempting to achieve in the near or distant future, or is it more a processual, reactive type of process?  

AHV 

I think it’s both. Part of it is that we absorb ourselves in projects that really call our attention or that we see commonalities. We consider whether it is an issue that a neighboring community resonates with us. We’ve talked to people who’ve done soil sampling before—such as with East Yards and their fight to shutdown Exide—people who already have this wisdom. And we’ve also worked with the Coalition Against Lennar fighting the developer mentioned before, because it’s about public land. They’re taking away land to build condos. 

We are a little reactionary, but in the long term we are just making sure that we protect our community, protect our neighborhood. We want to see more green spaces and spaces that are good for our environment, youth, and animals. 

  Ultimately, and I know this is going to be hard, but we need to shut down Quemetco. It’s sad that it’s still around and it’s so harmful, and if it’s still there, it’s going to continue polluting our community even if they say, “Oh, we’re adding this filter… or over-monitoring… or a little lead is not that bad…” NO! Any quantity of lead is too much. Our health is in serious jeopardy because of it. But there are other factories involved. It’s all connected. I think Quemetco is a big one that we obviously must address, but there are other factories. 

Boom  

Lastly, is this an open group? If not, what are the ways that people (who are interested or believe in this type of cause or form of justice) within the area can either join, participate, or support the organization? 

AHV 

Yeah, so that’s interesting. It’s something that we reflected on in our last meeting. At first, I think we always saw ourselves as an open group. We don’t want to be exclusive. But we had to reevaluate. Of course, it’s still open in the sense that we want to have support our actions and public-facing events. We need this form of support and solidarity. That’s the crucial thing about doing coalition-building. Through social media networking nowadays or supporting other groups, they’ll turn around and support you.  

  There’s nothing wrong with just being a little bit smaller, too. We don’t need a lot of people. The agency and identity, and even sovereignty, of our group is important to remember and value as well. The people brought in from the outside can jeopardize the core and spirit of the group. If someone is really interested, of course, we’re not going to turn them away. But I think what’s important is just having people who you can rely on and trust because it’s not a small endeavor going against big companies and companies that have lots of well-paid lawyers. There is also a community, real people, and specific culture at stake. It’s kind of scary because we have to be careful as much as we have to fight. 

SOURCES

1) South Coast AQMD, “Quemetco,” date accessed January 18, 2023,
http://www.aqmd.gov/home/news-events/community-investigations/quemetco

2) Ibid & Lisa Fuhrmann, Quemetco’s Lead Legacy: A Cycle of Injustice and Contamination in
Southern California, EarthJustice, January 27, 2021

3) George Ramos, “Report Urges Firms Be Held Liable for Cleaning Stringfellow Acid Pits,” Los
Angeles Times, September 24, 1986

4) Tracy E. Perkins, The Evolution of a Movement: Four Decades of California Environmental
Justice Activism, (Oakland, California: UC Press, 2022), 26.

5) United States v. Stringfellow, 661 F. Supp. 1053, 1061, 17 ELR 21134 (C.D. Cal. 1987), 11

6) Jill Johnston, Soil Sampling Data near Quemetco Battery Recycling, City of Industry, CA, USC
Department of Preventive Medicine, July 2016

7) Scott M. Lesch, et al, Final Report: Statistical Modeling and Analysis Results for Topsoil Lead
Contamination Study (Quemetco Project), University of California Riverside, January 28, 2006
& Nancy L. C. Steele, Off-site Sampling Report in the Vicinity of Quemetco Inc. December 1991
& Jill Johnston, Soil Sampling Data near Quemetco Battery Recycling, City of Industry, CA,
USC Department of Preventive Medicine, July 2016

8) Nancy L. C. Steele, Off-site Sampling Report in the Vicinity of Quemetco Inc. December 1991

9) Daniel Ross, “Lax Regulatory Enforcement Leaves Thousands at Risk of Lead Poisoning in
California,” Truthout, November 22, 2015

10) Ibid

11) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Lead in Drinking Water,”
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/sources/water.htm#:~:text=EPA%20has%20set%20th
e%20maximum,in%20the%20body%20over%20time, accessed January 18, 2023

12) South Coast AQMD, “Quemetco,” date accessed January 18, 2023,
http://www.aqmd.gov/home/news-events/community-investigations/quemetco

13) Cal. Dep’t of Toxic Substances Control v. NL Indus., 2:20-11293-SVW (JPR) (C.D. Cal. Jan.
31, 2022)

14) mark! Lopez of East Yards Communities for Environmental Justice in a talk given to local
organizers in San Gabriel Valley, February 2012

15) Ecobat, “Our Business,” Ecobat.com, https://ecobat.com/our-business/, accessed January 18,
2023

16) Fuhrmann, Quemetco’s Lead, January 27, 2021

[For full disclosure, previous editors and SEMAP co-directors Romeo Guzmán and Carribean Fragoza as well as graduate editorial assistant Daniel Talamantes have a continuing relationship with AHV and support their efforts as well as attend their events.] 

1 2 3 … 53